Junior Automation Specialist

About the role
This post supports the automation work that sits under our digital strategy and performance improvement mandates: the small tools and workflows that take repeated manual effort out of a client's finance, operations or reporting process. You carry a working piece of the mandate from day one, building the thing, testing it with the people who will use it, and fixing what breaks. The work is entry level in title, but you are accountable for the artifact you hand over.

About Namaa Partners
Namaa Partners is a strategy advisory firm working mostly with organizations in Saudi Arabia and with companies that hold significant interests there. We advise family groups and their holding companies, listed corporations, private equity portfolio companies, banks and insurers, government entities, and industrial operators. We take on problems that do not fit the large-firm model, and the principals who scope a mandate are the ones who deliver it. Engagements often continue past the recommendation, with partners sitting in on board meetings and testing management plans as decisions get implemented.

What you will do

• Build and maintain spreadsheet and script-based tools that replace recurring manual steps in client processes, then document how they run.
• Map an existing workflow with the client's own staff, write down each step and handoff, and mark where it fails or waits.
• Test automations against real client data, record what breaks, and correct it before anything goes to a steering group.
• Prepare the working materials that support a recommendation: process maps, control notes, and short operating guides for the people who will run the tool.
• Sit in on client sessions with a principal, take the notes, and turn them into a written record of what was agreed.
• Keep the internal toolkit in order, so a tool built on one mandate can be picked up and adapted on the next.

What we need from you

• Comfort with spreadsheets at a level beyond formulas: you can structure a table, clean messy input, and explain your logic to someone else.
• Some working knowledge of at least one scripting or automation tool, whether from study, a project, an internship or your own initiative.
• The ability to write plainly in English. Most of what you produce will be read by people who are not technical.
• Arabic is helpful for client conversations and for reading source documents, but not required for the role.
• Patience with a process that is described inconsistently by three different people, and the discipline to write down the version that is actually true.
• A habit of checking your own output before someone else finds the error.

What success looks like
Within six months, a client team runs one of your tools without calling you first, because the guide you wrote is good enough to stand alone. Within a year, you have taken a workflow from a first mapping session through to a working tool in a live process, and the client can name the hours it gave back. Principals start bringing you into scoping conversations because your read of a process is reliable. The measure is not how clever the build is, but whether the people using it trust it.

How decisions get made
A principal scopes the mandate and decides what the work needs, including who is on it. You are staffed onto engagements by that principal, and you report into the engagement lead for the duration. Sign-off on anything client-facing sits with the principal, not with you, though your judgment on technical feasibility is expected to shape the recommendation before it is written. When a build runs into a limit, or a client asks for something outside the scope, you raise it early rather than absorbing it quietly. Escalation goes up through the engagement lead and stops there.

What the role offers
This is a permanent, full-time position, hybrid, based in Riyadh. You will work alongside principals on mandates for established institutions in the Kingdom, which means early exposure to how boards, holding companies and management teams actually make decisions. The technical range is wide because the problems are: one week a reporting pack, the next a data cleanup in an operating business. You will see the whole arc of an engagement rather than a slice of it.

Who tends to do well here
People who write things down and would rather be corrected early than admired late. People who can sit in a room where the client uses vocabulary nobody taught them and still come out with the process mapped. People who like being accountable for a number and can say plainly when a number is wrong. If that describes how you work, this role will feel familiar.