Senior Controls Engineer, Innovation

About Us:

BW Packaging is driving performance at the intersection of people, technology, and customer care. As part of the privately held Barry-Wehmiller family, we unite a global team of packaging experts with a clear purpose:
People Who Care, Building Solutions that Perform. We take on our customers’ toughest challenges as our own — delivering both innovative and enduring solutions that set the standard for value and performance. Our strength comes from our people and the power of our brands — trusted names in packaging that are known worldwide for engineering excellence, application expertise, and lifetime commitment to customer success.

Truly Human Leadership guides our belief that exceptional business results and profound respect for people together provide the foundation of enduring success. We are committed to forging lasting partnerships with our customers, earning their trust through integrity, expertise, and execution. With our full range of packaging solutions and long term partnership and service, we help customers achieve operational excellence today while building the future of packaging together.

Barry-Wehmiller is a diversified global supplier of engineering consulting and manufacturing technology for the packaging, corrugating, sheeting and paper-converting industries. By blending people-centric leadership with disciplined operational strategies and purpose-driven growth, Barry-Wehmiller has become a $3 billion organization with nearly 12,000 team members united by a common belief: to use the power of business to build a better world.

Job Description:

Turn bold automation ideas into packaging technology that performs in the real world. As our Controls Engineer, Innovation, you will develop, prove, and scale the controls solutions that shape the future of BW Packaging’s product portfolio. You will combine hands-on engineering with creative problem-solving across PLCs, HMIs, motion, robotics, vision, safety, and connected technologies.

Working with Product, Applications, Sales, Field Service, Engineering Operations, and customers, you will uncover genuine operating challenges and turn them into testable concepts, prototypes, and proof-of-concept systems. You will assess performance and technical risk, then help move the strongest ideas into repeatable, scalable products.

Expect a varied role: around 70% innovation and technology development and 30% product and customer-project support, flexing with business priorities.

What You’ll DoCreate What’s Next Find the opportunity. Work with customers and commercial, field, and engineering teams to uncover unmet needs and turn them into clear use cases and technical requirements.

Shape the concept. Create solutions that balance customer value with feasibility, safety, reliability, cost, manufacturability, serviceability, and scale.

Build and program prototypes. Design, integrate, and test controls using PLCs, HMIs, motion, vision, sensors, drives, safety systems, and industrial networks.

Explore emerging technology. Assess new tools and platforms for technical fit, risk, and business value.

Prove what works. Create test plans, run structured experiments, analyse results, and make evidence-led recommendations to advance, refine, redirect, or stop a concept.

Engineer, Integrate & Deliver Integrate complete systems. Connect primary machinery with third-party equipment and optimise sequences, motion profiles, and cycle times.

Design safety in. Apply machine-safety requirements and configure controllers, zones, guarding interfaces, light curtains, interlocks, and safety-rated monitored stops.

Take solutions from build to start-up. Support debug, validation, FAT, installation, SAT, commissioning, and optimisation.

Solve the hard problems.…