Cron job
A task set to run automatically on a schedule, like every night at 2am, with no person starting it.
What it tells you about a developer
Cron jobs are quiet plumbing, and the person who writes them has thought past the happy path: what happens when a run fails at 2am with nobody watching, or when one run overlaps the next. Comfort here signals operational habits, the kind built by keeping a real system running over time.
Cron is the decades-old Unix scheduler, and its name now covers any scheduled task. Teams use cron jobs for nightly reports, backups, cleanup, and syncing data between systems. The schedule is written in a compact five-field format that developers recognize on sight, and every cloud platform offers its own version of scheduled jobs.