Automation Systems Engineer Automation Platform Engineer

Job Description

High-Level Requirements Contracted Role to Build Automation Systems

Role Title (suggested): Automation Systems Engineer / Automation Platform Engineer (Contract)

Role Overview: Design build and operationalize automation solutions that reduce manual operational toil improve reliability and standardize repeatable run activities. The contractor will deliver production-ready automations with appropriate controls logging and documentation and will partner with Service Delivery and SRE stakeholders to prioritize implement and measure outcomes.

Objectives & Scope

• Identify and prioritize automation candidates (manual tasks recurring incidents high-MTTR activities/KPI and others assigned) in partnership with operations/SRE.
• Deliver automations that are secure auditable and supportable (monitoring alerting runbooks and handoff).
• Standardize patterns and reusable components so solutions scale across domains/applications.
• Quantify impact (hours saved number of times run defect reduction MTTR improvement) and feed these to a dashboard for reporting.
• Identify the run frequency that would indicate an underlying problem to address and setup notification for this condition.

Key Responsibilities

• Automation design & build: Create workflows/scripts/services to automate operational processes (e.g. ticket triage steps data validations batch reruns retries reconciliations reporting).
• Platform integration: Integrate with enterprise tooling (ServiceNow monitoring/observability schedulers CI/CD) as needed to run automations safely in production.
• Reliability controls: Implement guardrails (idempotency retries/backoff rate limits circuit breakers) robust error handling and recovery paths.
• Security & compliance: Follow least-privilege access secrets management logging standards and audit requirements for systems and data.
• Testing & quality: Build unit/integration tests perform non-prod validation and define acceptance criteria aligned to operational readiness.
• Observability: Add structured logs metrics and health checks; define alerts/dashboards to detect failures and measure throughput.
• Documentation & handoff: Produce runbooks support guides and knowledge transfer for Tier 2/3 ownership.
• Stakeholder partnership: Participate in intake grooming technical design reviews and demos; provide weekly status and risks/issues.

Expected Deliverables

• Automation backlog & intake: A ranked inventory of automation candidates with effort/ROI estimates and success measures.
• Reusable automation framework: Templates/libraries for common patterns (config logging retries auth scheduling notifications).
• Production-ready automations: Delivered in increments each with code tests deployment artifacts and operational documentation.
• Operational readiness package: Runbook monitoring/alerting rollback plan and ownership handoff checklist for each automation.
• Metrics & reporting: A simple dashboard or report showing delivery progress and realized benefits (hours saved per month/year to date number of times run MTTR reduction error rate throughput). These metrics should be available per automation and for all automations.

Required Qualifications

• 5 years building automations in enterprise environments (platform operations or reliability automation).
• Strong development skills in at least one automation-friendly language (e.g. Python Java JavaScript/TypeScript PowerShell C) and comfort with APIs.
• Experience building resilient production-grade workflows (error handling idempotency retries auditing).
• Experience with CI/CD and source control (e.g. Git) including branching and code review practices.
• Hands-on experience with Linux/Unix and scripting; ability to troubleshoot across logs jobs and infrastructure.
• Understanding of security fundamentals: least privilege secrets management non-person IDs/service accounts and data handling.
• Ability to work from ambiguous requirements and translate operational pain points into implementable technical solutions.
• Experience documenting and training others on the automations created and how they are invoked-automatically when a condition occurs or manually to address an identified condition.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• RPA experience (e.g. UiPath Automation Anywhere Power Automate) and/or workflow orchestration (e.g. Airflow Control-M Ansible TWS/IWS).
• ServiceNow development/automation (Flow Designer IntegrationHub scripting) and ticket lifecycle automation.
• Cloud-native automation (containers Kubernetes serverless functions) and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform).
• Observability tooling experience (logs/metrics/traces) and building dashboards/alerts.
• Experience in regulated environments (SOX/SOC) including evidence capture and audit-friendly change practices.
• Familiarity with data reconciliation financial operations or payment/rebates domains.
• Experience with Jira Confluence and ServiceNow.

Engagement Model & Working Expectations

• Cadence: Weekly planning/prioritization; bi-weekly demos; weekly written status (progress blockers risks next steps).
• Collaboration: Partner with Production Support Engineering for toil identification and acceptance; partner with SRE for standards (monitoring reliability patterns).
• Definition of Done: Automation is deployed monitored documented and handed off with ownership and support instructions.
• Change control: All production changes follow standard change processes approvals and evidence capture.

Success Metrics (Examples)

• Reduction in manual hours/week for targeted processes (baseline vs. post-automation).
• Decrease in recurring incident volume for automated failure patterns.
• Improvement in MTTR/MTTA for automatable recovery scenarios.
• Automation reliability: success rate failure rate and mean time to recovery of the automation itself.
• Adoption: number of teams/processes onboarded to standardized patterns and reusable components.

Assumptions & Dependencies

• Timely provisioning of required access (non-person IDs/service accounts) and test environments.
• Availability of SMEs for process walkthroughs acceptance testing and operational handoff.
• Agreement on target platforms/standards (logging monitoring deployment approach) to ensure consistency.