---
title: 'Labour AI Specialist at Sona'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/labour-ai-specialist-sona-london-4cnmvn952xvq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Labour AI Specialist at Sona

- **Company:** Sona
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Compensation:** £85k–£100k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sona/548c4d2b-ad4c-4f3a-a876-2726f15cc8c7

## Job description

## About Sona

Running a frontline business is an operational puzzle most software has never touched. Shift-by-shift labour costs, compliance that changes by region and by role, and margins thin enough that a badly built rota can sink a quarter. It's a harder problem than most white-collar SaaS, and yet frontline sectors employ 80% of the global workforce and have received about 1% of the last decade's software investment. We think that's because the problem needed AI, not just better software, before it was solvable. Frontline organisations sit on enormous amounts of operational data. Used properly, that data lets agents take on real parts of running the business rather than just reporting on it. That's what we're building at Sona, and it's early enough that the systems you build now will still be foundational in three years. We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona [here](https://www.sona.ai/careers).

## About the Role

Sona's Labour AI team builds the forecasting, rules and scheduling tools that help hospitality and retail businesses get staffing right. This role is about getting that tooling to work for a specific site: its trading patterns, its staff, its quirks. You'll work directly with customers to turn Sona's tools into labour models that are used on site and have a huge impact. You'll derive labour rules from real trading data, spend time on site with customer teams to learn how the business runs, and build the trust with site managers. You'll present the impact and ROI of that work to customer executives and general managers, and act as the subject matter expert for labour optimisation in sales conversations. You'll also be the person site managers trust enough to change how they staff, and the person customer executives and General Managers trust enough to back the changes you're proposing. You'll need as much influence as analysis to make that work. You'll report back to customer leadership on the impact, in numbers they can take to their own board. You'll adapt the same underlying labour model across different business types, from QSR to premium dining to retail.

## Responsibilities

- Derive labour rules from real trading data using Sona's tooling and your own operational knowledge
- Spend time on site with customer teams, learning practical realities like stock deliveries and close-down procedures
- Build trust with site managers so workload models actually get followed
- Present impact and ROI to customer executives and general managers, winning buy-in for operational change
- Act as the labour optimisation subject matter expert in sales conversations
- Work across the full portfolio of live customer projects, picking up work as priorities shift between accounts

## Requirements

- An operational background in hospitality, retail, or a similar hourly-workforce, fluctuating-demand business. You understand how the business runs day to day, not just how to analyse it from the outside
- Confident presenting to and winning buy-in from customer executives, general managers and boards, and comfortable holding your own with competing agendas in the room
- Comfortable with technology and confident picking up new tools quickly, including using AI tools in your own workflow
- Able to look into the data yourself and make decisions from what you find
- Comfortable operating without a fixed playbook
- Excited about using AI in your day-to-day work to 10x your output
- Bonus: a retail or workforce-management background where the underlying concepts transfer to hospitality

Bonus: a commercial finance background with genuine credibility in front of operators

We're a hybrid working team you can expect to work 2+ days/week in our London office (Soho), and 2+ days/week on site with customers.

## Benefits

- Salary: £85,000 - £100,000
- Share options
- 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
- Extra day of leave for every year of service
- Pension contributions matched up to 5%
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Enhanced parental leave & pay
- Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery)
- Annual all expenses paid team retreats
- The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
- Professional development budget
- Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.

## About Sona

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sona is a next-generation, AI-powered workforce management platform built for large, complex frontline enterprises in hospitality, social care, retail, and logistics.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $45M raised April 2026)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Steffen Wulff Petersen (CEO), Oli Johnson (CFO), Ben Dixon (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Workforce Management (WFM) Software, Human Capital Management (HCM), AI for Frontline Operations
- **Target customers**: Large, multi-site frontline enterprises with 250+ employees in hospitality, social care, retail, and logistics (B2B, Enterprise).
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To future-proof frontline operators with intelligent AI, replacing outdated legacy systems and unifying scheduling, HR, payroll, and engagement.

## Products & Services
- **Sona Platform**: An end-to-end, AI-first workforce management platform that combines Scheduling, Time & Attendance, HR, Payroll, and Employee Engagement. It is designed for complex, multi-site operations with variable demand.
- **Raffy (AI Assistant)**: An AI-powered assistant that helps managers make better decisions by providing real-time actionable insights, demand forecasting, and automated scheduling recommendations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$115.5M**. Annual revenue is estimated at **$2.5M** (as of latest reports).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: N47 (lead), Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI Fund), Italian Founders Fund, Speedinvest. Senior Advisor: David Campbell (former Chairman/CEO of Wagamama, PizzaExpress, The Ivy Collection).
- **Growth Signals**: 
    - Headcount grew **46% YoY** to 133 employees.
    - Raised $45M Series B in April 2026.
    - Has acquired companies (Yapster, Employee Republic Limited) to expand capabilities.
    - Customers include major brands like Hawksmoor, Popeyes UK, Paul Bakery, Côte, Voyage Care, and others.
    - Claims customers typically reduce labour costs by at least 1% in the first month.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-first Architecture**: Unlike legacy platforms that retrofit AI, Sona was built from day one with AI at its core, enabling deeper integration and smarter automation.
- **Deep Industry Expertise**: The founders previously ran a frontline business with over 10,000 employees, giving them firsthand understanding of complex operational challenges.
- **End-to-End Platform**: Unifies Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Engagement into a single system, reducing the need for multiple vendors.
- **Measurable Impact**: Proven ROI with customers seeing 1-2% labour cost reduction in the first month and 25%+ EBITDA improvement at enterprise scale.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to become the category leader in AI-powered frontline workforce management. Deepening AI capabilities (demand forecasting, automated scheduling) and expanding into new verticals and geographies.
- **Direction for growth**: Continuing to win large enterprise customers, expanding the partner ecosystem, and leveraging AI to automate more operational decisions.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include being "AI Everywhere" (AI-first in thinking and work), "Relentless" (full ownership of outcomes), "Curious" (deep knowledge of product and customers), and "Speed" (moving fast and acting with conviction).
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Operates a **remote-first model** with offices in London, New York, Austin, and Lisbon. The company covers the cost of co-working spaces for those outside office locations. The team comes together twice a year for full-team retreats.
- **Notable Perks**:
    - **Professional Development**: Quarterly £200 budget for courses, conferences, books, and learning.
    - **Equipment**: £600 new starter budget for home office setup, plus a new MacBook. Supplementary £300 annual budget.
    - **Leave**: 25 days holiday + 10 flexible public holidays, with 1 extra day per year of tenure. Enhanced parental leave: 26 weeks full pay for primary parent, 8 weeks full pay for secondary parent.
    - **Health & Finance**: Comprehensive health insurance (Bupa in eligible countries), pension contribution (up to 5% match), and share options for all permanent employees.

## Sources
1. [getsona.com (Careers)](https://www.getsona.com/careers)
2. [linkedin.com (Sona)](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/getsona)
3. [sona.ai (About)](https://www.sona.ai/about)
4. [builtin.com (Sona)](https://builtin.com/company/sona-getsonacom)
5. [remotecorgi.co.uk (Sona)](https://www.remotecorgi.co.uk/companies/sona)

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