Automation Engineer

Summary of the role:

We have partnered with an organization who has already invested in automated process discovery tooling, so you won't spend your first six months hand-building data pipelines to figure out where the waste is. They have a substantial portfolio of RPA automations already running in production, which you'll inherit on day one.

This is a balanced opportunity that is made of up greenfield and stewardship. Which is not for everyone and we understand that. You'll build new automations on the company workflow orchestrations and RPA platforms, plus custom code where a visual builder isn't the right tool. You'll also take ownership of an existing portfolio - stabilizing what's brittle, consolidating what's redundant, and retiring what shouldn't have been automated in the first place.

Discovery software tells you what is happening; it doesn't tell you why, or which of the five variants is the one that matters, or that other parts of the business have been quietly working around the system. It will be your responsibility to ensure everyone is working collaboratively and is aware of what they are doing. We want someone with genuine business analyst instincts who will sit with users, ask the next hard question, and understand a process before rebuilding it.

A day in the life:

• Inherit and own the existing RPA portfolio: assess health, fix what's dated or unused, consolidate duplicates, document what's undocumented, and retire flows that no longer earn their keep
• Interview and observe the people doing the work. Run discovery sessions and workshops, dig past the first answer, and surface the exceptions, workarounds, and edge cases that tooling alone won't reveal
• Turn process discovery output into a prioritized, quantified automation backlog - what it costs today, what it costs to fix, what they get back
• Write the requirements: user stories, acceptance criteria, exception paths, and the failure modes everyone forgets until go-live
• Design, build, test, and maintain new automations across their workflows and RPA platforms, plus custom code where appropriate
• Own reliability across the whole portfolio: monitoring, alerting, error handling, retries, and clear runbooks
• Document processes clearly enough that the owning team can understand and adjust them
• Measure what goes out against what you promised, and be transparent in your reporting
• Help the rest of the company get better at this: internal enablement, patterns, guardrails, and knowing when not to automate something

Who are you?

• You automate your own work. You've built the script, the shortcut, the pipeline that saved you three hours a week - and then you built four more. This is the key!
• Hands-on with AI dev tooling. You work daily in tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, and you have real opinions about where they shine and where they'll happily produce confident garbage
• Business analyst instincts. You can run a discovery session, elicit requirements from someone who's never written one, and get to the real process rather than the one on the org chart. You ask the follow-up question
• Practical engineering skills. Comfortable in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar. Confident with REST APIs, auth flows, JSON, webhooks, and Git
• Workflow automation experience. Any of the major orchestration or iPaaS platforms - the underlying instincts matter more than the specific product called out in a resume.
• Willingness to maintain, not just build. A meaningful share of year one is understanding and improving someone else's work. If that sounds like a chore rather than a puzzle, this isn't the right fit
• Systems thinking about people. You can talk to a controller about their month-end close, understand the edge cases they're worried about, and get buy-in before you change how their job works
• Pragmatism. You know the difference between a process that should be automated and one that should be eliminated or renegotiated first

What makes you stand out above the rest?

• Business process modeling - BPMN or equivalent, at a level of detail people actually read
• Experience with RPA at scale, especially inheriting, auditing, or consolidating an existing bot portfolio. n8n experience.
• Familiarity with task or process mining tools and translating their output into action
• Browser and UI automation: Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium
• Formal continuous improvement background: Lean, Six Sigma, value stream mapping
• Built and shipped things with LLM APIs: structured extraction, document processing, tool-using agents
• SQL and data work: dbt, warehouse modeling, BI tooling
• Light infrastructure: Docker, CI/CD, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), self-hosting automation platforms

Why This Role?

• Real scope from day one: a live portfolio to own plus a mandate to build new
• Already invested in discovery tooling, so you spend your time on solutions instead of hunting for problems
• Budget and mandate for the tools you need, including AI tooling
• Direct line to leadership and to the people whose work you're improving

Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability and protected veteran status