Senior AI & Automation Architect

Role: Senior AI & Automation Architect / Engineer
Location: Remote
Need Someone with IT Telecom industry experience

This role designs and builds the automation and AI capabilities that move a utility’s IT, telecom and operations teams from manual, ticket-driven work toward repeatable, self-service and increasingly autonomous processes. The architect/engineer partners with network, infrastructure, security and business teams to identify high-value use cases, design the target-state architecture, and deliver working automation into production with the governance a critical-infrastructure environment requires.

Key Responsibilities
•      Use-case discovery and prioritization: Work with process owners to map current-state workflows, quantify effort and risk, and rank automation candidates by value, feasibility and reuse.
•      Architecture and standards: Define the automation reference architecture – orchestration layer, source of truth, integration patterns, secrets management, logging and approval gates – and publish reusable patterns and coding standards.
•      Build and integrate: Develop infrastructure-as-code, workflows, APIs and integrations across network, compute, ITSM, monitoring and identity systems; replace one-off scripts with versioned, tested, supportable automation.
•      AI and agentic automation: Evaluate and implement AI-assisted capabilities (for example, ticket triage, change-risk analysis, knowledge retrieval, intelligent runbooks) with clear human-in-the-loop controls, evaluation criteria and data-handling guardrails.
•      Governance and security: Embed change management, auditability, role-based access and security review into automation pipelines; align with applicable regulatory and compliance requirements (for example, NERC CIP where in scope).
•      Enablement and adoption: Coach operations and engineering teams on automation practices, build a backlog and intake process, and track measurable outcomes (hours saved, cycle time, error rate, change success).
•      Vendor and partner collaboration: Work alongside platform vendors and delivery partners; evaluate tools and ensure knowledge transfer so capabilities are owned internally.

Required Qualifications
•      7+ years in IT, network or infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years designing or delivering automation at enterprise scale.
•      Strong scripting and programming skills (Python required; PowerShell, Go or JavaScript a plus).
•      Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and an orchestration or workflow platform (for example Ansible, Terraform, Itential, ServiceNow).
•      Experience with REST APIs, model-driven interfaces and integrating multiple systems of record.
•      Working knowledge of Git-based workflows, CI/CD and automated testing for infrastructure.
•      Ability to translate business and operational problems into technical designs and communicate with both executives and engineers

Preferred Qualifications
•      Experience in utilities, energy or other regulated critical-infrastructure environments, including OT/IT convergence and telecom (FAN, WAN, field communications).
•      Practical experience applying LLMs or AIOps in production, including evaluation, guardrails and cost management.
•      Relevant certifications (for example Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, ServiceNow CSA/CAD, Cisco DevNet or CCNP, cloud architect certifications).
•      Experience establishing an automation center of excellence or internal automation practice.

Typical Technology Landscape
Domain    Representative tools and skills
Network and infrastructure automation    Ansible, Terraform, Python, Itential or similar orchestration, NetBox or other source-of-truth, YANG/NETCONF/RESTCONF, gNMI telemetry
Workflow and process automation    ServiceNow (ITSM/ITOM, Flow Designer, Orchestration), RPA platforms, event-driven automation
AI / ML and agentic automation    LLM and agent frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, AIOps / anomaly detection, prompt and evaluation practices
Engineering practices    Git, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, API design, containers, observability

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