AI Automation Engineer for AI-Powered Newsroom

We are building a modern Arabic digital news platform focused primarily on the Gulf region (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman). Our goal is to significantly scale high-quality content production while maintaining editorial quality, SEO best practices, and an efficient publishing workflow. We already have an established WordPress news website, active social media channels, and a growing editorial process. We are now looking to build an AI-assisted newsroom that automates repetitive tasks while keeping human editors responsible for editorial decisions and quality control. This is not a simple automation project. We are looking for someone who can design and build a scalable content production pipeline that can continue evolving over time. Project Goal Create an affordable AI-powered newsroom workflow that dramatically reduces manual work involved in discovering, organizing, drafting, optimizing, publishing, and monitoring news content. The solution should rely on cost-effective tools and open-source or reasonably priced platforms whenever possible. We are not looking for expensive enterprise solutions. Current Workflow Today, our editors typically: Search multiple news websites. Find relevant stories. Rewrite articles. Optimize them for SEO. Create featured images. Upload everything manually to WordPress. Create Facebook posts. Publish manually. Monitor performance manually. This process is becoming difficult to scale. What We Want to Build We want one integrated system that helps our editorial team work significantly faster. The system should assist with the following: 1. News Discovery Automatically monitor hundreds of trusted sources including: RSS feeds Official government websites Press release pages News agencies Technology websites Business websites Google News Google Trends Other relevant public sources The system should continuously discover new stories. 2. Story Organization Automatically: Categorize stories Detect country Detect topic Group similar stories Remove duplicates Assign priority Detect trending topics 3. Editorial Dashboard Provide one place where editors can review incoming stories. For each story we would like to see: Headline Source Summary Suggested category Suggested tags Suggested priority Similar existing stories Status 4. AI Draft Creation Once an editor selects a story, generate: Arabic article draft SEO title Meta description Suggested slug Suggested tags Categories Excerpt Internal linking suggestions Image prompt Facebook caption Editors should then review and approve before publication. 5. WordPress Integration After approval: Automatically Create WordPress draft Assign categories Assign tags Upload featured image Populate SEO fields Schedule publication 6. Image Workflow Automatically generate or assist with: Featured images Image optimization Alt text Web-friendly image sizes 7. Social Media Workflow Generate and schedule: Facebook posts Facebook captions Featured image Future expansion to other platforms is desirable but not required initially. 8. SEO Assistance Automatically assist editors with: Focus keywords Meta descriptions Internal links Related articles SEO scoring Readability suggestions 9. Analytics Generate daily or weekly reports showing: Top-performing articles Best traffic sources Facebook performance Publishing statistics SEO performance Recommended improvements 10. Scalability The system should be designed to grow over time. Future phases may include: Additional AI capabilities Multiple languages Video generation YouTube workflows Automated newsletters Push notifications Additional social platforms Technical Requirements We are open to your recommendations. Potential technologies may include: n8n Make WordPress REST API OpenAI API Claude API Gemini API RSS feeds Google Trends PostgreSQL Supabase Cloud storage Other appropriate technologies We value architecture and reliability more than any specific tool. Important Requirements The system should: Be modular Be affordable to operate Minimize API costs Be easy to maintain Be well documented Be expandable Allow human approval before publishing Avoid vendor lock-in where possible What We Expect From You We are looking for someone who can: Design the overall architecture. Recommend the most suitable technologies. Build the workflows. Connect APIs. Integrate WordPress. Optimize costs. Document everything. Provide recommendations for future improvements. We value proactive thinking. If you believe there is a better approach than what we have described, we want to hear your ideas. Nice to Have Experience with: Digital publishing News websites Editorial workflows SEO automation AI-assisted writing WordPress news sites Facebook publishing RSS aggregation Large-scale content production To Apply Please include: Similar automation projects you have built. The technologies you would recommend and why. How you would keep operating costs low. How you would structure the system for long-term scalability. Your estimated timeline. Your estimated budget. Any suggestions or improvements beyond our initial concept.