Substation Automation Engineer - Grid Modernization

Location:

Burlington, MA, US;
Walnut Creek, CA, US;
Denver, CO, US;
Irvine, CA, US;
Bloomington, MN, US;
Chicago, IL, US.

In this role, you may have the opportunity to:

• Lead the transition of IEC
  61850-based digital and virtual substations from pilot to production, shaping real-world grid modernization outcomes.
• Design and standardize secure, vendor-agnostic substation automation architectures that improve resilience, flexibility, and scalability.
• Serve as a technical leader and subject‑matter expert, influencing system architecture, best practices, and emerging standards.
• Collaborate with utilities, technology partners, and industry groups (including vPAC Alliance) to help define the future of protection, automation, and control.

Candidates located near any Black & Veatch U.S. Regional Office may be considered, with preference for the following locations:
Boston (MA), Chicago (IL), Denver (CO), Minneapolis (MN), Irvine (CA), or Walnut Creek (CA).

Black & Veatch is expanding its Power SCADA team to support a strategic grid modernization initiative focused on IEC 61850-based substation automation and virtual substation technologies. As a founding member of the Virtual Protection, Automation, and Control (vPAC) Alliance, Black & Veatch collaborates with industry leaders to advance open, secure, and vendor-agnostic digital substation solutions that replace traditional, hardware-intensive architectures with virtualized, software-defined platforms.

Following successful pilot efforts, this role is being created to bring in experienced SCADA professionals who can help design, implement, standardize, and support production-ready Power SCADA solutions that enable resilient, flexible, and future-ready grid infrastructure.

• Develop SCL engineering artifacts including ICD, CID, and SCD files, datasets, logical node mappings, reporting and control blocks, and GOOSE publications and subscriptions.
• Configure and validate MMS, GOOSE, and SV messaging for protection, automation, monitoring, and SCADA applications.
• Design and document station-bus and process-bus network architectures using PRP/HSR, VLANs, QoS, multicast management, and traffic segmentation practices.
• Design deterministic real-time networking paths for time-sensitive protection and automation applications, incorporating latency budgeting, PTP timing performance, and behaviors defined for substation-class devices meeting IEC
  61850-3 and IEEE
  1613 environmental and EMC requirements.
• Diagnose and optimize real-time network behavior through traffic-capture analysis, timing-accuracy evaluation, and system-level tuning techniques for time-critical digital-substation workloads.
• Develop PTP-based time-synchronization architectures including grand master, boundary, and transparent clock configurations and incorporate timing considerations into the system design.

• Integrate multi-vendor IEDs with protection settings and logic, coordinating measurements, controls, alarms, and event data with SCADA and HMI systems.
• Apply IEC
  61850 data-modeling concepts to confirm interoperability across mixed fleets of protection and control devices.

• Incorporate cybersecurity principles into system architecture, including authentication, role-based access control, network segmentation, secure communications, and device hardening.
• Apply cyber-informed engineering principles by identifying high-consequence functions and integrating protective measures directly into system architecture, embedding security decisions from the earliest stages of engineering rather than treating them as add-on controls.

• Develop and configure virtualized protection, HMI, gateway/RTU, and related substation applications on platforms including VMware ESXi with vCenter, vSAN, and NSX;
  Red Hat KVM or Open Shift Virtualization; and SEAPATH’s real-time, high-availability hypervisor platform designed to run virtualized protection, automation, and control workloads with deterministic performance and PTP-synchronized operation on industrial servers meeting IEC
  61850-3 and IEEE
  1613 criteria.

• Contribute to, or develop toward contributing to, IEEE and IEC standards and collaborative initiatives related to IEC
  61850, digital substations, time synchronization, and cybersecurity.
• Support participation in technical bodies and industry groups such as IEC, IEEE, CIGRE, ISA
  99, and vPAC Alliance work streams.
• Support the advancement and practical application of virtualized protection, automation, and control concepts in alignment with the architectural direction established by the vPAC Alliance.

• Produce engineering documentation including network specifications, SCL models, timing plans, interface definitions, and system diagrams used across design, laboratory validation, and field implementation.
• Collaborate with project managers,…