Automation Engineer

Role Overview

We're building a company where the boring work gets done by machines. That means fewer copy-paste handoffs, fewer "just ping me and I'll update the spreadsheet" processes, and more systems that run themselves.

We're further along than most. We've 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. We also have a substantial portfolio of RPA automations already running in production, which you'll inherit on day one.

That's the honest picture: this is part greenfield, part stewardship. You'll build new automations on our workflow orchestration 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.

The part we can't solve with tooling is people. 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 Accounting has been quietly working around the system since March. That's on you. We want someone with genuine business analyst instincts who will sit with users, ask the third and fourth question, and understand a process before rebuilding it.

Responsibilities

• Inherit and own our existing RPA portfolio: assess health, fix what's brittle, consolidate duplicates, document what's undocumented, and retire flows that no longer earn their keep
• Interview and observe the humans 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 we 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 our workflow 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 shipped against what you promised, and report it honestly
• Help the rest of the company get better at this: internal enablement, patterns, guardrails, and knowing when not to automate something

Qualifications

• 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 single strongest signal for us
• 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 on your résumé
• 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

Bonus Points

• 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
• We've 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

Benefits & Perks

• Health / Dental / Vision Insurance Plans
• 401K Plan with Employer Match
• Life Insurance Plan (100% employer paid)
• PTO Plan (3 weeks PTO for new employees, grows with tenure)
• 6 paid holidays
• Paid Parental Leave
• Free professional coaching through Boon Health
• Baby-feeding support and on-site Lounge through Pumpspotting
• Comprehensive training program
• Commitment to defend employees who have signed predatory non-competes (Learn more here)
• Ongoing, in-house professional development
• In-office gym complete with strength and cardio equipment as well as Peloton bikes
• On-site snack machine
• On-site golf simulator

Additional Info

• A cover letter is highly recommended, even if it's brief. Tell us why you are a fit!
• Signing a non-compete agreement is NOT a pre-requisite for employment. However, we do require all employees to sign our standard non-solicit and confidentiality agreement.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Ally Logistics is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, height, weight, marital status, disability, or any other protected status under applicable law.