Automation Engineer

At Schuberg Philis, we specialize in mission critical IT, partnering closely with our customers to ensure their most vital and critical systems run smoothly and securely, with 100% responsibility, and 100% uptime.

Our impact is powered by our engineering colleagues who are - deeply technical, automate every possible step of the way, thrive cross platform, take full end-to-end ownership, stay endlessly curious, work collaboratively, and understand the whole stack - from application functionalities to core infrastructure systems.

We’re looking for engineers who thrive in automation-first, mission-critical environments and are eager to help shape the platforms our customers rely on daily. As part of a self-steering customer team with end-to-end ownership, you will work directly with customers to ensure core business-critical systems remain stable, secure, and high performing. Together, you plan, build, run, and continuously improve complex, business-critical systems across the entire technology stack - including operating systems, networking, storage, monitoring, cloud, automation tooling, security, and technical application management.

You automate everything you touch using configuration management, scripting, and Infrastructure-as-Code principles, applying curiosity, technical depth, and end-to-end responsibility to every challenge, whether improving release pipelines, troubleshooting multi-layer issues, or enhancing application performance. Real ownership and deep collaboration define our approach - no silos, no handovers.

/ What you will do

As a Mission Critical Automation Engineer you plan, build, run, automate and improve platforms that underpin key processes of major organizations. Your work blends infrastructure engineering, application understanding, automation craftsmanship, and deep troubleshooting skills. Day-to-day activities include:

• Automate everything: build and maintain scripts (PowerShell, Python, Bash) and configuration management code (Ansible, DSC, Chef).
• Plan–Build–Run ownership of mission critical platforms.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across OS, network, database, security, application logic, and integrations.
• Understand customer applications and business workflows to identify root causes and improve performance.
• Operate and evolve cross-platform environments - Windows, Linux, (private) cloud.
• Design, test, and execute controlled releases using pipelines, Git, and peer review.
• Implement secure authentication flows using certificates, mTLS, OAuth, and automated identity provisioning.
• Collaborate closely with customer teams, developers, platform engineers, and functional stakeholders.
• Drive improvements proactively: stability, performance, automation, and simplification.
• Take end to end ownership of incidents, fixes, and long-term improvements.

/ What you bring

Must have skills:

• Strong automation mindset: demonstratable experience building structured and advanced scripts.
• Hands on experience with configuration management tooling (Ansible, DSC, Puppet, Chef).
• Ability to troubleshoot across multiple layers (OS, network, DB, application, integrations).
• Ability to reason about application behavior and link customer workflows to technical patterns.
• Flexibility to work across diverse IT platforms.
• Experience with Git and CI/CD practices.
• Strong understanding of core security principles and how to apply them across mission critical platforms.
• Curiosity, analytical thinking, and intrinsic motivation to understand how systems really work.
• End-to-end sense of ownership and accountability for production systems.

Nice to have skills:

• Proficiency with Terraform or other Infrastructure-as-Code tools and the ability to structure environment definitions in code (even if the exact tooling is new to you).
• Exposure to containerization concepts (Docker, Kubernetes) and how they might fit into modern environments.
• Experience working with cloud platforms, including Azure, AWS, or private solutions.
• Solid grasp of application and network architectures, integration patterns, and how components interact across the stack
• Basic understanding of database behavior and performance factors
• Familiarity with release and deployment lifecycles
• Ability to connect business workflows to application and platform behavior

/ Who are you?

• A T-shaped engineer who enjoys diving deep while maintaining broad context awareness.
• Someone who prefers automation over repetition and code over clicking.
• A pragmatic problem solver who collaborates openly and embraces feedback.
• A self-starter who thrives in a self-steering, high-trust engineering culture.
• Someone who is excited by complex systems, customer impact, and continuous improvement.

/ What can you expect?

At Schuberg Philis, you’ll join a community of engineers with an awesome combination of exceptionally high security standards, an infatuation with automation, and the power to make a positive, sustainable impact on customers’ business. Due to the nature of our customer engagements, there is no pressure on (billable) hours; we focus on quality and impact – or how we like to call it: “freedom & responsibility”. You know best how to deliver the most value.

You’ll be embedded in a company committed to helping colleagues grow as people and professionals through training, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and good old-fashioned fun.

Our offices are high quality workspaces, and we go way beyond what is expected. We have productive equipment, good food and drinks, team outings, family days, labs to experiment with innovative technologies, etc. We’re active in relevant tech communities, attending and organizing meetups and conferences, and we organize internal knowledge sharing events where Tech Leads play an important role.

If you are a seasoned engineer in the Netherlands who wants to combine deep technical work with customer contact and impact, we’d love to hear from you.