AI Automation Engineer

At OneSpan, we specialize in digital identity and anti-fraud solutions that create exceptional and secure experiences. We’re looking for an engineer who is genuinely on top of agentic AI – someone who believes agents can take over work that today ties up whole people, and who can prove it inside real engineering teams. This is a founding role. You’ll embed with our R&D teams, find the manual, repetitive work that slows them down, and build the automations – agentic where that’s the right tool, plain scripting where it isn’t – that give them their time back. Our engineers are strong and overloaded; your job is to make them much more productive without adding to their plate. Do this well and you’ll grow it into a small team you lead. Here is a little taste of your challenge:
• Embed and find the work worth removing: Shadow our R&D teams to learn how work really flows, and find the bottlenecks and repetitive manual work hiding in plain sight. Rank opportunities by how often they happen and how much they cost – not by how interesting they are to build. Testing and QA processes are often the richest place to start.
• Prioritise with each team’s manager: The managers want this help – you’ll agree with each of them what to tackle first and the time to protect for it, so the highest-value work gets done.
• Build it – agent-first, but not agent-only: Design and ship the solution end-to-end. Reach for agents where judgment and language are in the loop; reach for a script, pipeline or bit of tooling where that’s simply more reliable. A simple, dependable solution is worth more than a clever one that breaks.
• Build for handover, so the team can own it: You build with the team, not for them – and because each team owns its automations after handover, you design them to be owned: documented, monitored where it matters, and maintainable by a normal engineer on that team. A handover isn’t “here’s a tool,” it’s “here’s something your team can run and improve without me.” That’s also how automations earn trust – they have to be robust enough that teams rely on them and make fewer manual mistakes, not more.
• Set the standard, then grow the team: You’re the first hire and the template for everyone who follows. As the work justifies it, you’ll have the chance to lead a small (2–3 person) team focused entirely on AI adoption across R&D. Who are you?
• There is no set route into this role. But to be successful, this is the kind of profile we have in mind:
• Deep, current agentic AI: You live in this space. You know the tools, the patterns and the limits, and you genuinely believe agents can absorb work that’s done by hand today.
• Empirical about what actually works: And precisely because you believe in agents, you’re honest about when something is just a script. You choose the simplest thing that reliably works. This pairing – conviction plus sober judgment – is the whole job.
• A strong generalist who ships: You build and deliver, not just design. You’re fluent enough across backend, scripting, CI/CD and tooling to automate almost anything you find.
• You go after repetitive work: You see manual, repetitive tasks as a problem to solve, and you ask “how often, and how costly?” before deciding what’s worth automating.
• You earn trust and build alongside people: You embed, listen, and build with a team rather than dropping finished tools on them. Collaborative, not lone-wolf.
• Fresh eyes, no baggage: You do NOT need mobile or security experience. We want someone who looks at entrenched workflows and questions them – not someone who has already accepted them as normal.
• Product / platform mindset: Your users are our engineers; the time you give back to them is your product.
• Leadership is upside, not a requirement: If you want to grow into leading the team, great. If you’d rather stay hands-on and deep, also great.
• Fluent in English (essential); Spanish is highly valued for working day-to-day with our Barcelona-based teams. Practically Speaking, what's in it for you:
• A rare greenfield mandate – you define how a whole organization adopts agentic AI, starting from a blank page.
• Freedom to bring the right tools – you’ll start from our current stack (Claude, our core languages and tooling) and have real latitude to introduce whatever works better.
• Teams who want this – the managers are asking for the help and are ready to work with you.
• Simplicity – because we like to make things easy and practical.
• Beautiful office in the heart of Barcelona – with regular team events (breakfast, lunch…).
• Good transport connections – easy to reach by public transport.
• Flexible

working hours
& hybrid working. #LI-Hybrid #LI-LS1