1. Role overview
The work starts inside a client's business, sitting with the people who do the job and writing down how it runs, including the rules nobody documented.
Then you build the system that carries it, on their platforms and inside their controls. A demonstration is not a system, so approvals, an audit trail and an owner exist before anything goes near real work.
You do not hand it over. The engineer who scopes it builds it and then operates it, which is how you find out what you got wrong.
2. Key Responsibilities
Sit with the people who do the work and map the process as it actually runs
Record the exceptions that live only in somebody's head
Write the blueprint the client signs off before any code exists
Build the system inside the client's own platforms and systems of record
Design the approvals, the escalation and the audit trail with the client's team
Run the system beside the existing process until its output is trusted
Operate what you built, and extend it to the next process
3. Qualifications
You have taken something you built all the way into production and lived with it afterwards.
Strong Python or TypeScript, and comfort inside somebody else's codebase and data model.
Experience integrating with systems of record: ERPs, CRMs, policy or claims systems, document stores.
Working knowledge of current models, and of where they stop being reliable.
You can sit with someone and understand how their job really works.
You write clearly enough that a client's own engineers can review your design.
Comfortable on a client site, and comfortable saying that a process is not worth automating.
You would rather own one system that runs than ship five that do not.
4. The work
Understand the client's process before choosing the technology.
Build systems for real operational work.
Work with the people who know the process.
Learn from the behaviour of systems in production.
Choose tools to fit the client's platforms and controls.
Document decisions so other engineers can follow the work.
Connect engineering decisions to the work the system must carry.
Keep the client's people involved as the system evolves.
