AI Analyst

Role Summary

This AI Analyst position focuses on enhancing research, trading intelligence, KPI reporting, and signal extraction for Volcafe's coffee trading and research operations based in London, UK. The role acts as a critical link among research, trading, data, AI, and business functions, aiming to improve how market insights and commercial data are used through AI-driven solutions and workflow automation.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with research and trading teams to refine market intelligence gathering and synthesis.
• Develop workflows to extract trading and liquidity signals from diverse communication channels and data sources including emails, Teams chats, broker updates, and external market commentary.
• Automate regular updates and reporting for research outputs and trading activities.
• Create tools to compare and consolidate market commentaries and structured feeds for commercial stakeholders.
• Design KPI reporting systems covering desk performance, trading volume, research metrics, pipeline indicators, and operational statistics.
• Improve signal extraction from unstructured and semi-structured data sources such as documents, scraped data, and uploaded files.
• Assist with ERP data integration, mapping enterprise data into AI workflows, and supporting API and system interoperability.
• Build and prototype AI-enabled workflows using internal tools, including prompt libraries, agent workflows, Q&A over documents, and automated assistants.
• Work alongside IT and engineering teams to transition prototypes into production-ready solutions and document workflows and quality controls.

Qualifications and Skills Needed

• Experience in commodity research, trading analytics, commercial analytics, data science, or related business analysis roles.
• Comfortable working with both structured datasets and unstructured textual content.
• Proficiency in Excel and at least one analytics tool such as Python, SQL, Power BI, or Tableau.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively with trading and research teams.
• Capability to transform business requirements into analytical models, automation workflows, or AI-enabled processes.
• Meticulous attention to detail and ability to operate efficiently in a dynamic commercial setting.

Preferred Experience

• Knowledge of coffee or other physical commodity markets like soft commodities, agriculture, energy, or metals.
• Familiarity with trading desk operations, market data interpretation, liquidity analysis, pricing commentary, and KPI management.
• Experience extracting insights from emails, chats, PDFs, reports, or web-scraped data.
• Exposure to ERP, trading, logistics, finance systems, or enterprise reporting platforms.
• Hands-on experience with AI/LLMs, including prompt engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic AI, and workflow automation tools.
• Practical skills in Python or SQL for data extraction, analysis, automation, and prototyping.
• Development of dashboards, data pipelines, automated reports, or market intelligence applications.
• Understanding of commercial consumption of research, signals, KPIs, and trading intelligence.

Success Criteria

• Accelerated and enhanced quality of market and trading intelligence delivered to traders and researchers.
• Systematic identification of trading and liquidity signals from various communication channels and data sources.
• More automated and reliable KPI reporting processes that simplify consumption by commercial teams.
• Repeatable and streamlined research workflows reducing manual effort.
• Improved integration of ERP and system data with commercial analytics and AI platforms.
• High trust in analytical outputs through consistent validation and source grounding.
• Widespread adoption of AI workflows in daily operations rather than isolated experiments.
• Recognition as a reliable intermediary between commercial and technology teams for AI and data delivery.

About the Opportunity

This role provides an exciting chance to be at the forefront of coffee commodity markets, leveraging AI and analytics to transform trading intelligence and research distribution. It offers a high-impact environment for candidates eager to merge commodity expertise with advanced analytics and AI-driven business enablement.