Manufacturing Post Delivery Engineer

Manufacturing Applications Engineer

Reports To
- Plant Manager (day-to-day) | Dotted line to Director of Engineering Operations

Location
- Decatur, Illinois — On-Site Required

Type
- Full-Time, Exempt

Department
- Manufacturing and Engineering

About Align Production Systems

Align Production Systems (APS) is a growing engineer-to-order and standard products capital equipment manufacturer specializing in automated guided vehicles, transporters, and material handling solutions. We build complex, high-value equipment for demanding industrial customers and support that equipment through its full lifecycle. Our Decatur facility is the primary manufacturing hub for the business. We are growing and we are looking for the right person to grow with us.

The Manufacturing Applications Engineer is a newly created position based full-time at our Decatur, Illinois manufacturing facility. This is not a design desk role. It is a hands-on, plant-floor-present engineering position that sits at the intersection of manufacturing execution, post-delivery customer support, and hydraulic systems. You will be the engineering presence in Decatur, the bridge between our St. Louis engineering team and the Decatur floor, and the primary engineering resource for everything that happens after a unit ships.

This role reports to the Plant Manager for day-to-day plant and aftermarket coordination, with a dotted line to the Director of Engineering Operations in St. Louis. You will attend daily engineering standups with the St. Louis team by video and travel to St. Louis a minimum of once per month for in-person design standards alignment and team integration. You will be assigned a Philippines-based engineering partner for drawing and documentation support.

Release Quality and Build Readiness

You review every engineering release destined for the Decatur floor before manufacturing begins. Drawings, BOMs, and documentation must be complete and build-ready before they reach the floor. When they are not, you catch it and route it back to engineering before it becomes a production problem. This is one of the highest-leverage things you do. A release quality miss caught at your desk costs an hour.

The same miss caught on the floor costs a day or more.

Engineering Liaison

You are the day-to-day bridge between the St. Louis engineering team and the Decatur manufacturing floor. Technical questions, clarifications, and in-process engineering decisions route through you. The floor has a direct engineering contact. St. Louis has a trusted Decatur representative. You eliminate the communication lag that is an inherent risk of a split-campus model.

Hydraulic Systems

Hydraulic circuit design, component selection, and system specification are a meaningful part of what APS builds and services. You do not need to arrive as a hydraulics expert. You need to arrive with the mechanical engineering foundation to become one. APS will support your development in this area through hands-on floor experience, access to our engineering team, and formal training resources.

The expectation is that within your first year you are building working competency in reading and interpreting hydraulic schematics, supporting component selection, and troubleshooting hydraulic systems on the floor and in the field. The longer-term expectation is that you become the go-to hydraulics resource at the Decatur facility. If you have some hydraulics exposure already, that is a plus. If you do not, but you are technically sharp and willing to invest in learning it, we will get you there.

Post-Delivery Engineering Support and Aftermarket

This is the part of the role that makes it different from a traditional plant engineer position, and it is where a significant portion of your impact will be felt. When a customer calls with a post-delivery engineering issue, whether it is a warranty investigation, a field fix, a retrofit scope, or a controls and hydraulic integration question, you are the first engineering resource.

You own the investigation, you document the findings, and you resolve what you can independently. When an issue exceeds a defined complexity threshold or…