Backend / Automation Engineer (Ongoing, Long-Term Contract)

Type: Part-time, ongoing retainer (est. 10–25 hrs/month to start, room to grow) Location: Remote Compensation: Hourly or monthly retainer — open to discussion based on experience ABOUT THE ROLE I run a group of small businesses and SaaS products and have a steady, ongoing backlog of internal automation and integration work. I'm looking for one reliable engineer to partner with long-term — someone who becomes familiar with my systems over time and takes operational processes off my plate by turning them into code that runs itself. This is not a one-off gig. The first month is a trial on a few well-defined projects; if it's a good fit, this becomes a standing monthly arrangement with a continuous stream of work. I write detailed specs and act as product owner — your job is to implement, deploy, and maintain. WHAT YOU'D BE BUILDING A continuous flow of automations and integrations, for example: Email-triggered data pipelines (read attachments from Gmail, transform, route outputs to the right people) Scheduled and event-driven jobs (cron, webhooks, polling) Connecting SaaS tools to each other via their APIs (CRM, email, telephony, e-signature, banking/treasury portals) Data cleanup, reconciliation, and reporting scripts Small internal services and dashboards Light maintenance and monitoring of what you've built STACK YOU'LL WORK IN Languages: Python, Node/TypeScript APIs & auth: REST, OAuth2, webhooks Data: Postgres / Supabase, pandas, CSV/Excel wrangling Hosting: Railway, DigitalOcean, AWS (Lambda/Lightsail), Vercel Tools in my world: Close CRM, Twilio, Google Workspace, BoldSign, n8n Comfort with Claude Code is a plus — I build heavily with it WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR Strong at integration plumbing: APIs, auth flows, scheduling, error handling. This is the core of the job. Writes clean, maintainable code and deploys it properly — secrets in env vars, sensible logging, failure alerts. Not just scripts that work once on your laptop. Handles sensitive data responsibly. Some work touches PII (e.g. business and personal identifiers). You understand why that means no third-party data-leak surfaces and careful credential handling. Communicates clearly and works from written specs. I'll give you a tight scope; you'll ask the right clarifying questions, then build. Reliable and responsive — this is a long-term partnership, so consistency matters more than raw speed. NICE TO HAVE Experience with no-code/low-code tools (n8n, Make, Zapier) for the simpler glue, so we can pick the right tool for each job Familiarity with the financial services / fintech space HOW TO APPLY Tell me briefly: Two or three automations or integrations you've built end-to-end — what triggered them, what they did, where they ran. Your experience with Gmail/Google APIs and OAuth. Your availability and rate (hourly or monthly retainer). Paid trial task: Strong candidates will be given one real, well-specified project (a Gmail-triggered file-transform-and-route automation) as a paid trial. How you handle the auth, secrets, error handling, and the sensitive-data aspects will tell me everything I need to know about a long-term fit.