Sr. Engineer, Controls and Automation (Electrical)
Description
Company
MCA - Alpolic
Job Description
The Sr. Engineer, Controls and Automation provides senior-level plant engineering leadership for electrical power, controls, automation, operational technology (OT), SCADA, and equipment-reliability needs in a continuous manufacturing environment. The role partners daily with Engineering, Maintenance, Production, HSE, Quality, Information Technology, corporate digital resources, vendors, and contractors to safely troubleshoot chronic failures; design and execute upgrades; establish and support secure, maintainable OT network infrastructure; implement and sustain the plant SCADA platform; improve equipment availability; and ensure electrical, controls, and OT systems are documented, recoverable, and aligned with company standards. The position combines hands-on field support with disciplined engineering analysis, network and control-system architecture, project execution, commissioning, cybersecurity coordination, and technical stewardship of production assets and facility systems.
MAJOR DUITIES AND RESPONSIBILITES
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Electrical, Controls, and Automation Engineering
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Design, specify, modify, and support industrial electrical and control systems, including power distribution, motor-control equipment, PLCs, HMIs, variable-frequency and DC drives, instrumentation, sensors, industrial networks, and machine-safety interfaces.
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Develop control narratives, functional requirements, I/O lists, panel layouts, schematics, network architecture, bills of material, and installation work packages.
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Program, configure, troubleshoot, and improve Allen-Bradley, Mitsubishi, and Siemens PLC/HMI platforms and associated drive systems. Support legacy systems while developing migration and obsolescence plans.
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Perform disciplined diagnostics using drawings, PLC logic, trend data, drive fault history, network diagnostics, and field measurements while preserving rollback capability.
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Maintain validated backups of PLC, HMI, drive, SCADA, server, and network-device configurations and control access and changes.
OT Network Infrastructure and SCADA
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Serve as the plant engineering lead and long-term technical owner for OT infrastructure supporting the SCADA system, while coordinating governance, security, remote access, server, identity, and enterprise connectivity requirements with Information Technology and designated corporate resources.
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Develop and maintain logical and physical OT network architecture, managed industrial switches, fiber and copper backbone requirements, network cabinets, UPS needs, addressing conventions, VLAN and segmentation requirements, and resilient communications paths.
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Lead or support design, configuration, testing, commissioning, and expansion of the Ignition SCADA platform, including gateways and clients, PLC connectivity, tags, alarms, trends, dashboards, historian functions, time synchronization, and approved system interfaces.
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Establish and maintain an OT asset inventory and device/IP register covering PLCs, HMIs, drives, instruments, switches, gateways, servers, workstations, and other connected production assets.
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Configure and troubleshoot industrial communications, including Ethernet/IP and other plant protocols, and isolate addressing, port, cabling, switch, bandwidth, duplicate-device, time-synchronization, and communications faults.
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Coordinate IT/OT boundary requirements, including approved architecture, segmentation, firewall rules, secure vendor access, accounts, patch and firmware planning, endpoint protection, logging, monitoring, and incident response.
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Develop backup, restore, disaster-recovery, and configuration-management practices for SCADA and OT assets and periodically verify recoverability.
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Plan cutovers and migrations with documented prerequisites, tests, communications, rollback points, production contingencies, post-startup monitoring, and turnover documentation.
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Develop OT and SCADA standards for naming, addressing, switch configuration, network drawings, cabinet design, remote connectivity, alarms, historian tags, programming changes, and future expansion.
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Partner with cybersecurity and IT resources to assess vulnerabilities and operational risk without compromising process safety, availability, vendor support, or validated functionality.
Reliability and Maintenance Support
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Partner with electricians, mechanics, planners, and production personnel to troubleshoot breakdowns, analyze failures, and restore equipment safely and efficiently.
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Lead or support root-cause investigations for recurring electrical, controls, communications, network, and process-equipment failures and verify corrective-action effectiveness.
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Improve preventive and predictive maintenance tasks for electrical assets, controls hardware, motors, drives, panels, field devices, SCADA components, servers, and network infrastructure.
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Review CMMS history, downtime data, alarms, work orders, historian trends, network events, and spare-parts usage to identify reliability opportunities.
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Develop critical-spare recommendations and lifecycle plans for obsolete or unsupported electrical, controls, SCADA, and OT equipment.
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Provide technical escalation support during significant equipment events and support planned shutdown, weekend, or on-call needs.
Projects, Installation, and Commissioning
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Develop project scopes, alternatives, estimates, schedules, risk assessments, and technical justifications for capital and expense projects.
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Lead or support upgrades from concept through startup, including design reviews, procurement, acceptance testing, commissioning, punch-list closure, and turnover.
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Coordinate multidisciplinary work involving mechanical systems, process requirements, electrical installation, controls integration, OT networking, SCADA, utilities, cybersecurity, and production constraints.
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Ensure projects include guarding, interlocks, alarms, maintainability, safe access, energy isolation, network and cybersecurity requirements, and required documentation.
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Monitor project cost and schedule and review technical quotations, purchase requisitions, change orders, invoices, and contractor deliverables.
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Plan cutovers and startups with prerequisites, contingencies, backups, rollback points, communications, and post-startup monitoring.
Safety, Risk, and Compliance
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Integrate safety through hazard review, risk assessment, management of change, pre-startup review, safe-work planning, and safeguard verification.
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Follow and reinforce lockout/tagout, electrical safe-work practices, arc-flash requirements, energized-work restrictions, PPE requirements, and machine-startup procedures.
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Immediately escalate conditions affecting safety functions, interlocks, protective devices, environmental controls, process control, SCADA visibility, or OT security. Do not leave undocumented bypasses, temporary addressing, unmanaged switches, or temporary network equipment in service.
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Support incident investigations, cause mapping, corrective actions, audits, cybersecurity response activities, and closure of findings.
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Ensure contractor and integrator work is properly scoped, authorized, coordinated, monitored, documented, and completed to site standards.
Documentation, Standards, and Team Capability
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Create and maintain electrical drawings, loop diagrams, OT physical and logical network drawings, device/IP registers, asset inventories, revision records, equipment files, and as-built documentation.
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Apply document control so field systems, drawings, code, configurations, network records, and backup repositories remain aligned.
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Develop troubleshooting guides, procedures, standards, job plans, recovery instructions, and training materials.
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Coach technicians in systematic troubleshooting, PLC/HMI navigation, drive diagnostics, electrical drawings, SCADA navigation, basic industrial-network diagnostics, controls documentation, and safe work practices.