How I Built an AI-Driven Job Automation Engine: My Hardest Engineering Lessons

Building a job automation engine sounds like a fun project until you hit the first React-based form that ignores your scripts. After months of building for one a client on a Job automation core, I've realized that modern web automation isn't about "botting"—it's about teaching code to behave with human-level nuance. If you're looking to build something similar or just want to level up your browser automation game, here is the blueprint I followed and the "gotchas" I learned along the way. 1. Don't Build a Scraper. Build a System. The biggest mistake I made early on was trying to run automation directly from my API routes. Browser instances are heavy; they spike memory and can kill your main service. My Solution: I moved everything to a distributed microservice architecture using NestJS and Bull (Redis). When you're building this, treat every automation as a background job. This gives you: Retries: If a page fails to load, the system retries with exponential backoff. Concurrency Control