Automation Engineer

Ally Logistics•Kentwood, MI

10d•Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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

Benefits

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
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