Zentist is transforming the dental insurance claims experience. We develop modern billing technology that streamlines the complex relationship between dental providers and insurance companies, making insurance billing and collections fast, transparent, and predictable.
Headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading investment firms including Costanoa Ventures, Point Nine Capital, and Fika Ventures, Zentist is building a category-defining platform for the dental industry. We operate with a remote-first approach, fostering a supportive environment for a globally diverse team. At Zentist, you’ll find a culture of respect, autonomy, learning, and development.
About the Role
As Zentist continues its rapid growth, we are strategically expanding and restructuring our RPA function to operate as two more agile, specialized units. We are seeking a Principal RPA Engineer / RPA Engineering Lead to spearhead one of these new units, helping to scale Zentist’s automation capabilities across high-volume, document-heavy, process-driven workflows.
This is a senior technical and leadership role inside Zentist’s engineering team. The ideal candidate has deep experience designing, deploying, and optimizing large-scale RPA systems in complex operational environments such as banking, insurance, accounting, healthcare, revenue cycle, or other document-intensive industries.
You will lead the evolution of Zentist’s RPA function as we scale automation across payer portals, insurance documents, payment workflows, claims processes, and internal operational systems. This role requires someone who can be hands-on technically while also building and leading a high-performing RPA team in a fast-growing environment.
You should be comfortable balancing multiple priorities: designing new automation solutions, improving existing production deployments, reducing RPA errors, increasing bot reliability, and helping the company adopt better technologies over time.
Responsibilities
RPA Technical Leadership
- Lead the design, development, deployment, and optimization of large-scale RPA solutions across Zentist’s engineering and operational workflows.
- Architect reliable automation systems for document-heavy and process-driven workflows involving portals, files, forms, queues, exceptions, and downstream systems.
- Evaluate and work with RPA technologies such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Microsoft Power Automate, Robocorp, browser automation frameworks, and other international or open-source alternatives.
- Define engineering standards for RPA development, testing, deployment, monitoring, documentation, and change management.
- Partner with engineering, product, operations, and implementation teams to translate complex business processes into scalable automation solutions.
Production Reliability & Error Optimization
- Own the reliability, stability, and scalability of RPA deployments in production.
- Identify, classify, and reduce automation failures, bot errors, manual exceptions, and process bottlenecks.
- Build strong observability around bot performance, error rates, retries, throughput, and exception handling.
- Improve existing automations for speed, maintainability, accuracy, and reduced operational dependency.
- Establish repeatable processes for root-cause analysis, incident reviews, and continuous automation improvement.
Team Leadership & Management
- Lead, mentor, and help grow a fast-scaling RPA engineering team.
- Manage competing priorities across new automation development, production support, optimization, and modernization.
- Create team operating rhythms around planning, execution, quality tracking, production support, and technical reviews.
- Help hire, onboard, and develop strong RPA engineers and automation specialists.
- Build a culture of ownership, urgency, reliability, and continuous improvement.
Technology Evolution
- Identify where Zentist should use traditional RPA versus APIs, integrations, scripts, workflow engines, AI, document intelligence, or other automation approaches.
- Lead adoption of new technologies that improve scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Help modernize brittle or legacy automation patterns without disrupting production workflows.
- Bring evidence of having successfully led major technology changes or automation transformations in prior roles.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, RPA, automation engineering, workflow automation, or related technical roles.
- 5+ years of hands-on experience building and scaling RPA systems in production environments.
- Experience with major RPA platforms such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Microsoft Power Automate, or comparable international/open-source platforms.
- Proven experience with large-scale RPA deployments in document-heavy or process-heavy industries such as banking, insurance, accounting, healthcare, revenue cycle, fintech, or BPO operations.
- Strong experience improving RPA reliability, reducing bot errors, optimizing retries, and managing production exception workflows.
- Experience managing or leading engineering teams in a fast-growing, high-priority environment.
- Strong understanding of portal automation, browser automation, document workflows, queues, retries, monitoring, logging, and operational support.
- Ability to operate at both a principal engineer level and a team leadership level.
- Strong communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally with product, engineering, operations, and business teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in healthcare, dental, insurance claims, payment posting, remittance processing, payer portals, or revenue cycle management.
- Experience with OCR, document AI, computer vision, AI-assisted automation, or document extraction workflows.
- Experience integrating RPA with APIs, databases, cloud systems, internal SaaS platforms, and workflow engines.
- Experience building or scaling an RPA center of excellence, automation platform team, or automation operations function.
- Experience with Python, cloud infrastructure, and modern software development practices.
- Experience replacing fragile RPA workflows with more scalable technical architectures where appropriate.
What Success Looks Like
- Zentist has a stronger, more scalable RPA engineering function.
- Existing automations become more reliable, observable, and maintainable.
- RPA error rates and manual exception volumes decline meaningfully.
- New automation solutions are designed with stronger technical standards from day one.
- The RPA team operates with clear ownership, better prioritization, and faster execution.
- Zentist adopts the right mix of RPA, APIs, AI, workflow automation, and engineering-led automation to support rapid growth.
Join Us
This is a rare opportunity to lead a mission-critical automation function inside a fast-growing SaaS company. If you are a senior RPA leader who has built large-scale automation systems, improved production reliability, led teams, and helped organizations adopt better technologies, we want to hear from you.
Join Zentist and help us build the automation infrastructure powering the future of dental insurance billing.
