Automation Engineer

SambaSafety

About The Position

We are seeking a Software Operations Automation Engineer to design, implement, and maintain automation that eliminates repetitive manual work and improves reliability across our operational workflows. You will build robust, scalable pipelines and services—centered on Apache Airflow and scripting—to automate file movement, scheduled FTP jobs, application health checks, data validation and remediation, log/table-driven alerting, and email-triggered actions.

Requirements

Apache Airflow: Strong proficiency creating, scheduling, and monitoring DAGs; task dependencies; sensors; operators; Airflow UI usage.
Scripting & Programming: Advanced Python and Shell (bash/zsh); writing maintainable, testable automation code.
SQL & Databases: Solid understanding of SQL, query optimization, data validation patterns, and transactional safety.
File/Transfer Automation: Experience with FTP/SFTP, checksum verification, encryption, and secure transfer patterns.
Monitoring & Observability: Practical knowledge of log parsing, metrics, tracing, and alerting (e.g., building dashboards, threshold/condition-based alerts).
Version Control: Proficiency with Git (branching, PRs, code review).
CI/CD: Familiarity with pipelines to build, test, and deploy automation safely and repeatably.
API Integration: Comfortable with REST/SOAP, auth flows (OAuth2, API keys), and pagination/rate-limits.
Error Handling & Logging: Ability to design resilient jobs with retries/backoff, dead-letter queues, and structured logging.
Secure Automation Practices: Secrets management (e.g., vaults), least-privilege access, auditability, and compliance awareness.

Nice To Haves

Containerization & Orchestration: Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for packaging and running automation services.
Cloud Platforms: Exposure to AWS services (e.g., schedulers, queues, storage, serverless, IAM).
ETL/Data Pipelines: Background in ETL/ELT, data quality checks, and lineage.
Advanced Observability: Experience with tools like Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar.
DevOps Practices: Infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, and environment standardization.

Responsibilities

Workflow Orchestration: Design, develop, and maintain DAGs in Apache Airflow to schedule and coordinate operational tasks.
Task Automation: 1. Move files between systems/locations and confirm successful sends/receives. 2. Execute FTP pickups on defined schedules with retries and failure handling. 3. Ensure applications are running through automated health checks and restart routines. 4. Perform database data validation (referential integrity, threshold checks, anomaly detection). 5. Alert when specific conditions are identified in log files or database tables. 6. Modify data based on query results under controlled, auditable procedures. 7. Consume emails and trigger appropriate automated actions (e.g., parse inbox commands, route attachments, kick off jobs).
Reliability Engineering: Implement idempotent jobs, robust error handling, logging, and observability for all automation.
Integrations: Build and maintain API-driven integrations between internal/external systems.
Security & Compliance: Handle secrets/credentials securely; enforce RBAC; align automation with relevant compliance requirements.
Collaboration & Enablement: Partner with Operations, Data, Engineering, and Product teams to identify automation opportunities; document solutions; evangelize best practices.
Monitoring & Support: Proactively monitor pipelines and services; triage incidents; drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions.