AI Automation & Agents Engineer

AI Automation & Agents Engineer Remote | Contractor | Long-Term Opportunity We are looking for an exceptional AI Automation & Agents Engineer to work directly with the founder of a growing group of property businesses. This is not a role for someone who simply knows how to use ChatGPT. We want someone capable of understanding real business processes and turning them into robust AI agents, automations and integrated workflows. Our objective is to progressively build an internal AI and automation infrastructure that can monitor operations, process information, identify actions, communicate with our team, update systems, flag issues and ultimately remove significant amounts of repetitive administrative and management work. - The Role You will work directly with the founder and business team to: * Map existing business processes * Identify high-value automation opportunities * Design AI agents and workflows * Build and deploy them * Connect existing business systems through APIs * Build human-in-the-loop approval processes where appropriate * Test workflows against real-world edge cases * Monitor reliability and failures * Continuously improve existing agents * Document architecture and workflows * Recommend when traditional automation should be used instead of AI * Develop the underlying architecture that allows additional agents to be deployed quickly This is intended to become an ongoing role rather than a single automation project. - Example Projects Potential projects could include: * AI email triage and action extraction * Identifying tasks and deadlines from communications * Automatically creating and updating tasks * Operational monitoring agents * Property management workflow automation * Compliance document monitoring * Contractor and maintenance coordination workflows * Customer/tenant enquiry handling * Management reporting agents * Automated follow-up systems * Knowledge assistants with access to company documentation * Exception monitoring and escalation * AI-assisted quality control * Cross-system data synchronisation - Required Technical Skills Strong practical experience with: * n8n * OpenAI API * Anthropic/Claude API * REST APIs * Webhooks * JSON * OAuth/API authentication * JavaScript and/or Python * Databases / SQL * LLM tool/function calling * Structured AI outputs * RAG / knowledge retrieval * Error handling and retry logic * Logging and monitoring * Git/GitHub Experience integrating business platforms such as Microsoft 365, Monday.com, WhatsApp/Meta, CRMs, property-management systems or similar SaaS products would be highly advantageous. - What We Are NOT Looking For We are not looking for: * Someone whose experience is primarily prompt engineering * Someone who has only completed n8n tutorials * A chatbot designer * Someone dependent entirely on no-code templates * Someone who requires detailed technical instructions before they can build * Someone interested only in completing isolated projects We want a builder who can understand the business problem and determine the technical solution. The Person - You should be: * Highly proactive * Commercially minded * Extremely curious * Comfortable challenging poor processes * Able to work independently * Obsessed with reliability * Comfortable working directly with a founder * Capable of taking an unclear operational problem and converting it into a working technical solution You should regularly be prepared to say: "This shouldn't be an AI agent. A deterministic automation would be more reliable." We value good technical judgement more than using AI for the sake of using AI. Engagement - Initial engagement: * Remote * Contractor * Full time * Initial 3-month engagement/probation before full time The successful person should ultimately take ownership of AI and automation across the group. Application - Please provide: 1. Three AI/automation systems you have personally built. 2. A short explanation of: * what the business problem was; * the architecture you used; * what systems/APIs were connected; * what AI actually did; * what was deterministic; * how failures were handled. 3. Screenshots or videos demonstrating previous n8n workflows. 4. Your GitHub or portfolio, where available. 5. Your hourly/monthly rate. 6. The answer to this question: **Tell us about an occasion where you decided NOT to use AI for part of an automation because another approach was more reliable.** Applicants who progress will be given a paid practical assessment.