Understaffing is a problem in many sites, with many Automation Engineers as lone wolfs for complex fulfillment centers; on call 24/7 for sites that regularly have high severity events at all hours. Expect to be constantly monitoring your workplace, and frequently miss nights of sleep, depending on your site.
Many sites also heavily push maintenance tasks to the salaried Automation Engineers, going against Federal labor laws for "professional exemption", which is how a salaried pay is justified... further hurting the issues from understaffing when salaried professionals are ordered to track belts, train photo eyes, assemble cabinets, etc.
Engineering fixes require a large amount of unnecessary bureaucratic approval processes, which can take months. These approval process are very inefficient, requiring sign off from people who don't understand what they're signing off on, and prevent real changes from taking place... which is strange considering we're supposed to be engineers.
Metrics metrics metrics... if you're unlucky enough to be at a poor performing site you're going to spend half of your day bridging why the site isn't running correctly, which further prevents you from making actual fixes. Another example of unnecessary bureaucracy.
Career opportunities do appear frequently, but they are not good opportunities. If you don't like being oncall for your own site, a Senior Automation Engineer can be on call for dozens of sites across the country. Not worth a few thousand a year more.
