Automation & Controls Engineer, Greenfield Chemical Plant

Overview

Most controls engineers spend their careers babysitting someone else's legacy ladder logic. This is the opposite: a new plant, clean architecture, and you as the subject matter expert everyone who comes after you inherits.

Pave Talent is hiring on behalf of our client, a publicly traded specialty electronics materials company commercializing a first‑to‑market, copper‑based interconnect technology for advanced semiconductor packaging and high‑density datacenter chips. The work feeds the artificial intelligence (AI) hardware boom directly. This is the company's highest‑priority program, visible to the top of the house, with serious capital behind a multi‑site US scale‑up.

• Builders who want a brand‑new, fast‑scaling plant where the control system is theirs to define, not a mature site with every routine already locked
• Engineers who can read and own ladder logic and become the plant's programmable logic controller (PLC) expert
• People comfortable working hands‑on around flammable solvents and corrosives, with process safety first
• Wear‑many‑hats operators who move with urgency, run the plant 90 percent self‑sufficient, and only escalate the hardest problems

If you want a fully built‑out plant where every loop is already tuned, or you would rather not work around industrial chemicals, this is not your role.

Three years from now you will be telling people you built the controls architecture for a first‑to‑market electronics materials platform from the ground up. The hiring manager calls this a resume‑changing seat. You become the site expert on a nearly fully automated process, and as the company brings up more plants, the engineers who built the first one are the ones who scale the next.

The Fremont plant is an almost fully automated facility. A PLC controls the entire reaction area: reactors, mixing vessels, pumps, valves, and instrumentation. You will own the controls health of the plant, support a second plant coming online, and double as a controls resource on the capital‑project side as new lines get built. You report to the site engineering lead and work shoulder to shoulder with process engineering, maintenance, and the capital projects team.

• Read, troubleshoot, and own the ladder logic running the reaction‑area process equipment, and become the site subject matter expert on the platform
• Translate process and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) and process flow diagrams into input/output (I/O) lists, control narratives, and cause‑and‑effect matrices
• Troubleshoot process controls on heating and cooling systems, and the variable frequency drives (VFDs) running agitators and motors
• Build and configure control‑panel I/O modules alongside the capital projects team
• Run factory and site acceptance testing (FAT/SAT), startup, and onsite commissioning, then drive continuous improvement
• Support layer of protection analysis (LOPA) and safety integrity level (SIL) verifications and safety‑instrumented function design in flammable, corrosive, and cleanroom environments

This is a now job at a plant that is still being built out. The hiring manager wants someone who keeps the plant running roughly 90 percent on their own and escalates only the hardest 10 percent. You will be hands‑on around dangerous chemicals daily, the pace is fast because this is the company's top program, and the scope flexes between sustaining the running plant and supporting new builds.

The right person reads that as the appeal, not the catch.

• 8+ years of hands‑on PLC, distributed control system (DCS), and human‑machine interface (HMI) design, configuration, and commissioning
• Strong ladder‑logic skills on at least one major platform, with the ability to become the site expert. Opto 22 is the plant's platform;
  Allen‑Bradley (Rockwell) and Siemens experience transfer well and are welcome
• Comfort owning process controls in a plant that handles flammable solvents and corrosives
• Fluent with P&IDs, process flow diagrams, instrumentation, and VFDs
• Bachelor's in Automation, Electrical, Chemical Engineering, or related field
• Process industry background (chemical, biotech, pharmaceutical, or beverage), where precision process control is the norm
• Process safety exposure: LOPA, SIL, IEC 61511, NFPA 70/79, UL 508A
• TUV Functional Safety Engineer or platform certifications, Python or C/C++ scripting, vision systems, servo drives, safety PLCs
• Hazardous‑area classification knowledge (Class I/Div 2, ATEX)

Work in a fast‑scaling, plant‑building environment with access to a newly designed control system, opportunity to influence future sites, and a role that blends technical ownership with cross‑functional collaboration. The company supports health and safety with rigorous LOPA, SIL, and other industry standards.