This person needs to already be living in the AI space — and comfortable enough in automation to hit the ground running.
Skills:
Fluent in English (needs to be well-spoken and able to interact with internal engineering teams and present to management)
AI Agent / LLM Awareness (this is the most critical skill — candidate must understand how to take a problem, break it apart, and craft it into an AI solution. The manager wants someone who can explain how they would structure a problem to make it AI ready, how they would measure whether it's working, and how they would validate and tweak the solution. This is what carries the most weight
VS Code + GitHub + GitHub Copilot (must have hands-on experience using Copilot within VS Code as an AI coding assistant — this is their primary development environment)
Python (must have experience writing automation scripts and interfacing with APIs and AI agents — this is how they interact with the LLMs in the environment)
Rundeck / Ansible (The candidate does not need to have invented these tools, but they cannot be hearing about them for the first time. Some working knowledge of either is required — Rundeck is preferred but Ansible is acceptable. A strong AI candidate who can demonstrate they can work within automation tooling without being lost is acceptable)
Terraform (must have experience managing infrastructure as code and troubleshooting configurations)
Ticketing System Experience (ServiceNow is no longer a hard must have — candidate must be familiar with some form of ticketing software and understand how tickets are structured and stored. The ability to analyze ticket patterns to identify automation opportunities is what matters — ServiceNow knowledge is a plus but can be learned)
Nice to have Skills:
Gemini Enterprise or Anthropic API experience
ServiceNow specific experience