Controls Engineer II

The ASR Group family of companies make up the world's largest refiner and marketer of cane sugar. The companies produce a full line of grocery, industrial, food service and specialty sweetener products. Across North America, ASR Group companies operate five sugar refineries, located in California, Maryland, Louisiana, Canada and Mexico. In Europe, ASR Group companies operate sugar refineries in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and, with a joint venture partner, Italy.

The companies also farm sugarcane and own sugar mills in Mexico and Belize. The ASR Group portfolio includes the leading brands Domino, C&H, Florida Crystals, Redpath, Tate & Lyle, Lyle's, Sidul and Whitworths. ASR Group companies also produce and market Tellus, a single-use, compostable tableware and food service product made from plant fibers, including sugarcane.

The Senior Controls Engineer is the refinery's technical authority for automation, instrumentation, industrial networking, and process control systems. This role ensures reliable, secure, and sustainable control infrastructure that supports production, quality, safety, environmental compliance, and operational excellence.

The position partners with Corporate Controls Engineering, leads controls lifecycle and modernization strategies, and advances the site from reactive maintenance toward preventive, condition-based, and predictive practices.

• Serve as the site technical authority for controls, instrumentation, industrial networks, and process automation.
• Lead system implementations, upgrades, and modification sin accordance with company, ISA, functional safety, cybersecurity, and hazardous-area requirements.
• Direct and mentor engineers, technicians, contractors, and cross-functional teams while promoting standardization and knowledge sharing across ASR.
• Establish and govern programming, alarm management, architecture, documentation, testing, validation, and cybersecurity standards.

• Develop and executea multi-year controls and automation roadmap aligned with operational, maintenance, and capital priorities.
• Manage the lifecycle of PLCs, HMIs, historians, servers, operating systems, networks, instrumentation, and automation hardware.
• Identify obsolescence and criticality risks; develop modernization, replacement, stocking, replenishment, and vendor-supported spare-parts strategies.
• Maintainautomationasset inventories andoptimizecosts while reducing exposure to obsolete or long-lead equipment.

• Lead preventive, predictive, and condition-based programs using PLC/VFD diagnostics, event logs, fault histories, network monitoring, historians, and asset management tools.
• Use plant data and analytics toidentifydegradation, improve reliability, and develop asset-health KPIs and dashboards.
• Lead root-cause investigations for controls and instrumentation failures and implement sustainable corrective actions.
• Partner with IT, OT, Maintenance, Procurement, and Corporate Controls Engineering to improve system performance, cybersecurity, data access, and asset visibility.

• Own the controls
  
  Management of Change process and ensure modifications meet testing, validation, documentation, cybersecurity, and process-safety requirements.
• Provide controls and instrumentation expertise for capital projects,modernization work, commissioning, and major maintenance activities.
• Troubleshoot andoptimizerefinery, packaging, and auxiliary control systems;lead recovery after failures and prevent recurrence.
• Anticipate technical risks, provide on-call coverage, and support other engineers as needed.

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Controls Engineering, Automation Engineering, or a related engineering discipline from an accredited college or university is required.

• 10+ years of controls, automation, instrumentation, or process-control experience in refining, manufacturing, food or chemical processing, power generation, or a related industrial environment.
• Demonstrated success leading controls lifecycle, predictive maintenance, standards, modernization, and Management of Change programs.
• Experience upgrading industrial control systems, instrumentation, networks, and automation infrastructure.
• Experience leading capital projects from concept through startup and commissioning, including technical…