Senior AI & Automation Architect

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., * 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., 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

• 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, * 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.