Automation Engineer: responsibilities, education, skills and career path

Automates repetitive IT tasks through scripts, configuration management and pipelines.

Entry

Intermediate

Coding

High

Key skills

Scripting (Python/Bash)AnsibleConfiguration managementTerraform

Common progression

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Career overview

The Automation Engineer attacks toil. They identify repetitive tasks across systems, networks and applications and replace them with scripts, configuration management and pipelines. The role builds the automation culture that DevOps and platform engineering rely on, and it leads to DevOps Engineer, Infrastructure Automation Engineer or Platform Engineer.

Main responsibilities

Automate processes across the IT estate
Automate recurring tasks with scripts
Describe infrastructure as code and version it
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
Package and operate containerised workloads
Monitor platform health, alerts and dashboards
Prepare and execute change requests in production
Keep technical documentation up to date
Lead incident resolution and post-mortem analysis
Mentor junior team members and review their work

Technical skills

Scripting (Python/Bash)88%

Ansible85%

Terraform78%

CI/CD75%

Linux75%

Configuration management85%

Docker68%

Monitoring60%

Technologies

PythonBashAnsibleTerraformGitGitLab CIJenkinsDockerLinuxPuppetChefAWSAzurePrometheusGrafanaKubernetesVaultNginxPowerShell

Education level

Education requirements vary depending on the company, country and experience. Professional experience, certifications and technical skills can sometimes compensate for formal education.

High School / Bac

Less common

Bac+2 (2-year degree)

Common entry point

Bac+3 (Bachelor)

Common entry point

Bac+5 (Master / Engineering)

Common entry point