Principal Automation Engineer

Introduction

Be part of something great

Maximus is a global organisation that specialises in providing health and employment services to millions of people every year. Here in the UK, we employ around 5,000 people across the country to deliver services that have a profound impact on people’s lives. From assessments and health services to employability programmes and specialist support, we do work that matters with people who care.

The Role: Transform our clients through cutting edge Digital Solutions

Join our forward-thinking digital organisation as the senior technical authority for intelligent automation across Maximus UK. This role will lead the design, architecture, and implementation of complex automations that combine RPA, AI, APIs, and workflow orchestration to drive efficiency, quality, and scalability across services, including UK Government digital programmes.

As Principal Automation Engineer, you will provide hands-on technical leadership across the Automation Anywhere platform and emerging agentic automation capabilities, while helping shape the next generation of automation patterns for the organisation. You will work closely with business stakeholders, product owners, architects, and engineering teams to identify high-value automation opportunities, design scalable solutions, and ensure automations are secure, resilient, observable, and maintainable.

The role will champion modern intelligent automation practices, including AI-augmented workflows, document intelligence, conversational and decision automation, and agentic AI patterns where they genuinely enhance outcomes. You will help evolve the automation estate towards more reusable components, better governance, and a balanced use of platforms that delivers strong value for money while protecting security, data protection, and regulatory obligations.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the principal technical authority for intelligent automation initiatives, with deep expertise in Automation Anywhere and modern automation patterns
• Define and maintain automation architecture standards, frameworks, patterns, and best practices across RPA, AI-assisted automation, APIs, and orchestration
• Provide hands-on technical leadership in the design and development of complex automations using Automation Anywhere and related technologies
• Design scalable, reusable automation components, frameworks, and accelerators that improve delivery speed, quality, and consistency
• Build automations that integrate with enterprise applications, APIs, databases, document systems, AI services, and cloud platforms
• Design and implement AI-augmented and agentic automation workflows that combine RPA with AI agents, LLMs, decision automation, and event-driven orchestration
• Collaborate with business teams to identify automation opportunities, lead process discovery workshops, and translate complex processes into robust automated workflows
• Establish and enforce automation governance, including development standards, code review practices, CI/CD pipelines, testing, monitoring, and operational observability
• Ensure automations are secure by design and comply with enterprise security and data protection standards, including appropriate handling of PII and PHI
• Work closely with architects, engineering leaders to align automation solutions with enterprise architecture, delivery plans, and operational needs
• Mentor and guide automation engineers and developers, raising technical capability, architectural awareness, and engineering discipline across the automation team
• Monitor platform roadmaps and industry trends in RPA, AI automation, agentic workflows, and hyper automation, using insight to inform the automation strategy
• Evaluate and help introduce new automation capabilities, including document intelligence, conversational automation, AI orchestration frameworks, and agent-based approaches, where they deliver measurable value
• Contribute to shaping the overall automation roadmap, helping the organisation scale enterprise automation capabilities and modernise its automation architecture over time.

Essential Skills – What You'll Bring

• Extensive experience in software engineering, automation, or integration development within complex enterprise environments
• Exceptional hands-on RPA / intelligent automation development experience, including design and delivery of enterprise-scale automation solutions
• Deep expertise with the Automation Anywhere A360 platform, including bot development, orchestration, error handling, and operational best practice
• Strong experience designing scalable automation architectures that integrate RPA, APIs, data stores, enterprise systems, and cloud services
• Strong skills in process orchestration and workflow design, including exception handling, resilience, and recoverability
• Experience building automations that integrate with REST and SOAP APIs, databases, ERP/CRM/document systems, and other enterprise platforms
• Good programming/scripting skills in languages such as Python, JavaScript, or Java, and ability to use them to extend automation capabilities
• Strong understanding of secure automation patterns, API security, encryption, and best practice for handling sensitive data including PII and PHI
• Familiarity with AI-driven automation concepts including document intelligence, LLM-based automation, decision automation, and agentic process automation
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, and operational observability for automation solutions in production
• Ability to translate business needs into robust automation solutions, including leading solution design and architecture discussions with stakeholders
• Experience mentoring and guiding automation developers and engineers, providing constructive feedback and technical direction
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with architecture, product, engineering, and business teams.

Desirable Skills – What Makes You Stand Out

• Automation Anywhere certifications or equivalent recognition of platform expertise
• Experience with process mining or process discovery tooling to identify and refine automation opportunities
• Experience implementing hyper automation strategies that combine RPA, AI, integration, and low-code tooling
• Familiarity with AI orchestration frameworks, automation agents, or other emerging technologies in the agentic automation ecosystem

EEO Statement

MAXIMUS is committed to developing, maintaining and supporting a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the recruitment process. We know that feeling included has a dramatic impact on personal wellbeing and are working to ensure that no job applicant receives less favourable treatment due to any personal characteristic. Advertisements for posts will include sufficiently clear and accurate information to enable potential applicants to assess their own suitability for the post.

We are a Disability Confident Leader, thanks to our commitment to the recruitment, retention and career development of people with disabilities and long-term conditions. The Disability Confident scheme includes a guaranteed interview for any applicant with a disability who meets the minimum requirements for a job. When you complete your job application you will find a question asking you if you would like to apply under the Disability Confident Guaranteed Interview Scheme. If you feel that you have a disability and apply under this scheme, providing that you meet the essential criteria for the job, you will then be invited for interview. Your Guaranteed Interview application will only be shared with the hiring manager and the local resourcing team.

Where reasonable, MAXIMUS will review and consider adjustments for those applicants who express a requirement for them during the recruitment process.