AI Automation Engineer

7shifts is a scheduling and payroll platform designed to help restaurant teams thrive. With an easy-to-use app and industry-specific solutions, 7shifts saves time, reduces errors, and helps keep costs in check for over 55,000 restaurants. Our mission is to simplify team management and improve performance for restaurants, with a long-term vision of creating a thriving restaurant industry through the power of connected & engaged teams.

As an AI Automation Engineer at 7shifts, you’ll help teams across the business rethink how work gets done and build the automations that create meaningful capacity and output. Reporting to the CTO, you’ll partner with leaders to identify high-impact opportunities for automation, then design and build the workflows that bring them to life. You’ll be the person who turns “how can we automate this?” into solutions that actually ship, scale, and stick.

This is a hands-on role with broad exposure across the business. You’ll work closely with teams to understand their processes, identify where time and effort are being spent, and build AI-powered workflows and automations that help us work more efficiently and focus on higher-value work.

What you’ll do:

• Partner with teams: Work closely with leaders and teams to understand their workflows, translate business needs into automation opportunities, and help shape solutions that create meaningful capacity.
• Redesign processes: Challenge existing ways of working, eliminate unnecessary steps, and design simpler, more scalable processes before introducing automation.
• Build and ship: Turn ideas into practical AI-powered solutions, using LLMs, agents, and other tools to prototype, test, and launch automations that give teams back hours in their day.
• Connect systems: Integrate the tools and systems we already use through APIs and automation platforms to streamline how information and actions move across the business.
• Make it stick: Document solutions, establish clear processes and guardrails, and enable teams to confidently use and maintain what you build.
• Measure impact: Track outcomes like time saved, capacity created, and efficiency gains to understand what’s working and prioritize where to go next.

What you bring:

• Builder mentality: You’re comfortable taking an ambiguous problem from idea to implementation and have a track record of shipping and maintaining what you build - not just prototyping
• AI fluency: You have hands-on experience with LLMs and AI tools like Claude, OpenAI, or similar, and can speak to how you’ve used them to change the way you work or solve business problems.
• Responsible AI mindset: You understand the importance of building AI solutions responsibly, with appropriate attention to data privacy, security, access controls, and the handling of sensitive information. You know when data should, and shouldn’t, be used with AI tools and build with appropriate safeguards in place.
• Technical foundation: You have experience building and deploying AI-powered solutions and connecting systems through APIs. You’re comfortable with Python or a similar programming language, SQL and databases, and automation platforms such as n8n, Zapier, Make, or similar tools. You’re also familiar with modern development and deployment tools such as Git, Vercel, Railway, or cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Business-first mindset: You start with the business problem, not the technology. You can sit with a non-technical leader, understand how their team works, identify where automation can create value, and translate that into a practical solution.
• Process instinct: You question existing ways of working and look for chances to simplify, cut unnecessary steps, and build more scalable processes.
• Strong ownership: You’re comfortable working independently, navigating ambiguity, and driving projects from identifying an opportunity through implementation, iteration, and measuring the impact.
• Enablement mindset: You don’t just build and walk away. You document your work, set practical guardrails, and enable teams to confidently adopt, use, and maintain what you build.

It’d be even cooler if you had:

• Experience with workflow orchestration or RPA tools
• Familiarity with data pipelines or BI tooling
• Restaurant tech or vertical SaaS experience

Our commitment to our Shifties:

• Opportunity: Our product is evolving in exciting ways, an…