Engineer​/Analyst – Data Historian System Administrator

Engineer/Analyst – Data Historian System Administrator Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) JOB SUMMARY

This position will function as part of the Southern Power Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Center, which provides remote monitoring and diagnostic support to the SPC fleet of gas, solar, wind, and energy storage assets.

The Data Historian System Administrator serves as the SPC Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the operational data historian platforms the M&D and Operations organizations depend on — AVEVA PI (approximately 85%) and Aspen Tech IP.21 (approximately 15%). The role owns day-to-day administration, health, security, performance, and expansion of these environments, including PI Data Archive and Asset Framework (AF) server management, interface and connector configuration, tag and AF governance, site onboarding, upgrades and migrations, disaster recovery, and end-user support.

The role also sets the data quality standards, naming conventions, and governance practices that every downstream dashboard, report, analytic, and AI/ML pipeline is built upon.

In short, this role owns the operational data platform itself — ensuring the historian infrastructure the SPC fleet runs on is available, secure, accurate, and scalable, so every downstream consumer can trust the data they receive.

This position will closely interface with ROC Operators, M&D Analysts, the Operations Data Engineering Analyst, AI/ML Analysts, Performance Engineers, Asset Managers, Renewable Analysts, Commercial Optimization, SPC SCADA teams, Technical Shared Services, the Technology Organization, plant personnel, and historian vendors.

This position will be located at the Southern Power Remote Operations Center in Birmingham, AL and will be filled at a level and job classification commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the successful candidate.

• System Ownership & Administration — Serve as the primary administrator and single point of contact for all AVEVA PI and Aspen Tech IP.21 administrative tasks, including server health, archive management, backup and restore, licensing, security and access control, and user provisioning across the SPC fleet.

• Platform Availability & Performance — Monitor historian server health, archive sizing, buffer and queue status, collective/replication status, and overall system performance. Tune configurations and plan capacity so the platform stays available and responsive as the fleet grows.

• Upgrades, Patching & Migrations — Partner with IT and vendors to plan and execute historian hardware and software upgrades, patching, version migrations, and platform consolidation with minimal operational disruption. Validate data integrity before and after every change.

• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity — Liaise with the central server team to maintain, document, and periodically test backup, failover, and recovery procedures for all historian environments, including recovery runbooks and restoration time objectives.

• Interface & Connector Management — Liaise with the corporate data acquisition team to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot PI interfaces/connectors and IP.21 data sources, including buffering, failover, and communication with plant control systems and SCADA.

• Cybersecurity & Compliance — Administer historian environments in accordance with Southern Company cybersecurity standards, access management policies, and applicable regulatory requirements. Support audits, vulnerability remediation, patch compliance, and periodic account reviews.

• Data Quality Accountability — Accountable for ensuring a high standard of data quality across all historian and analytics systems. Establish monitoring for stale tags, flatlined signals, bad values, scaling errors, communication failures, and archive gaps, and drive identified issues to resolution.

• Tag & Asset Framework Governance — Own fleet-wide standards for tag naming, point types, compression and exception settings, units of measure, and AF templates and hierarchies. Review and approve changes to preserve structural integrity across all…