Automation Architect

We're hiring an Automation Architect to design and govern end-to-end automation patterns across APIs, workflows, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) actions. You'll define the architecture for safe, auditable automation-spanning orchestration engines, connector/adapters, policy-as-code guardrails, and reliability/observability. The ideal candidate blends integration engineering, workflow/RPA expertise, and platform governance to deliver secure, resilient, and cost-effective automations at scale.

• Automation Architecture & Roadmap: Define target architecture for orchestrated workflows (API, event-driven, and scheduled); create reference patterns for approvals, rollbacks, retries, and idempotency.
• HITL & Safety Controls: Design gated action flows (draft → approve → execute) with policy-as-code, entitlement checks (role/row/column), and auditable decision trails.
• Connector/Adapter Strategy: Standardize typed I/O contracts and error taxonomies for systems of record (e.g., ticketing, document services, data platforms, in-silico models); implement backoff/rate-limit handling and circuit breakers.
• Workflow & RPA Enablement: Select and configure workflow/RPA/iPaaS platforms (e.g., Camunda/Temporal/Airflow, UiPath/Power Automate, MuleSoft/Boomi); publish reusable blueprints and developer guardrails.
• Reliability & Observability: Establish SLOs and error budgets; implement tracing/logging/metrics (OpenTelemetry or equivalent); build dashboards for latency, success rate, and cost-per-automation.
• Security & Compliance: Embed SSO/OIDC, secret management, data minimization, and audit logging; partner with security on threat models (injection, exfiltration, impersonation).
• Cost & Performance Governance: Define budgets, caching and queuing strategies, and autoscaling policies; monitor per-workflow spend and P50/P95 latency targets.
• Delivery Leadership: Review designs/PRs, mentor engineers, and lead incident/post-mortem practices; maintain decision records and change-control gates across environments.

• Automation & Workflow Platforms: Hands-on with one or more: Camunda/Temporal/Airflow, UiPath/Power Automate/Automation Anywhere, or iPaaS (MuleSoft/Boomi).
• Integration Engineering: Strong API design and integration patterns (REST/gRPC, webhooks, event sourcing); message queues/streams (SQS/SNS, Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Reliability Engineering: Retries/backoff/idempotency, dead-letter queues, circuit breakers, bulkheads; performance tuning and capacity planning.
• Security-by-Design: SSO/OIDC, OAuth2, service accounts, secrets management (vaults/KMS), least-privilege RBAC/ABAC, audit logging.
• Observability: Tracing/metrics/logging standards, correlation IDs, run diagnostics, and actionable dashboards; SLO/error-budget management.
• DevOps & Platform: IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation), CI/CD (pipelines, artifact/versioning), environment promotion and release strategies (blue/green, canary).
• Programming Proficiency: One or more of Python, for building reference implementations and SDKs.
• Stakeholder Leadership: Clear communication, requirements elicitation, and cross-team alignment; ability to mentor and set engineering guardrails.

• LLM/Agentic Patterns: Designing safe tool-use flows, prompt/response guardrails, and evaluation hooks for AI-initiated actions.
• Knowledge & Data: Familiarity with vector/graph stores, data lineage/provenance, and policy-as-code over data access.
• UX for Approvals: Designing clear approval prompts, rationale views, and reversible actions for HITL experiences.

This role suits a hands-on architect who can codify best-practice automation patterns, balance safety with speed, and scale reliable integrations across complex enterprise ecosystems.