What is an automation engineer? A growing role to address IT automation

Automation has been a hot topic in the job market for several years now, with plenty of pros and cons surrounding both the idea of job creation and job loss. A study from Zippia found that automation has the potential to eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030, with 35% of Americans worried about automation displacing them and 25% of American jobs “highly susceptible” to automation. But automation is also predicted to create 58 million new jobs, with 85% of Americans supporting automation when it applies to jobs that are “dangerous or unhealthy for humans.”

Regardless of how people feel about automation, it’s here to stay, and companies are embracing automation technologies to streamline IT, business, development, and service processes. As automation increases, organizations across every industry are looking for automation engineers to help facilitate, manage, and oversee enterprise automation.

The automation engineer role

Automation has been a cornerstone of the manufacturing industry for decades, but it’s relatively new to the business, healthcare, and finance industries. Outside of manufacturing and factory automation, IT automation is typically focused on service automation and QA testing of automated processes. The goal of an automation engineer is to eliminate defects, errors, and problems with product or software development and with business or customer service processes.

Businesses are also increasingly embracing automated chatbots to help solve customer issues or to direct customers to the right person, and automation engineers help build, implement, and maintain that technology. Automation is also used to streamline IT help desk ticketing, service management and to deliver quality products and software faster, with fewer defects. Ultimately, the goal of an automation engineer is to reduce the load on workers and to improve efficiency and reliability by streamlining manual processes that are redundant or inconsistent.

What does an automation engineer do?

In IT, an automation engineer refers to someone who delivers automated solutions for software processes to improve efficiency, boost performance, and maintain systems. As a software automation engineer, you’ll have to work closely with other teams to help discover and eliminate problems by gathering requirements and implementing process automation. Sometimes this will include hardware or software, but other times you might be asked to automate service or business processes.

Responsibilities vary depending on the industry and specific company, but in general an automation engineer is expected to: