Lead Planning & Optimization Advisor​/Engineer

Location: Catlettsburg

An exciting career awaits you

At MPC, we’re committed to being a great place to work – one that welcomes new ideas, encourages diverse perspectives, develops our people, and fosters a collaborative team environment.

An exciting career awaits you

At MPC, we’re committed to being a great place to work – one that welcomes new ideas, encourages diverse perspectives, develops our people, and fosters a collaborative team environment.

Position Summary

The Value Chain Optimization (VCO) team has an opening for a Cross-Regional Planning & Optimization Advisor/Engineer. The Cross-Regional Planning & Optimization Advisor/Engineer plays a critical role in enabling enterprise-wide value optimization by aligning commercial strategy, operational constraints, and market dynamics across multiple regions. Reporting to the Cross Regional Optimization Director, this role operates at the intersection of planning, logistics, and commercial teams to drive consistent, economically optimized decision‑making across the value chain.

This individual serves as a highly collaborative and energetic integrator, partnering closely with logistics and commercial stakeholders. They facilitate cross-regional alignment, communicate complex concepts in a clear and actionable way, and influence outcomes across diverse stakeholder groups without direct authority.

Leveraging strong analytical skills and hands‑on experience with linear programming models, including PIMS, the Cross-Regional Planning & Optimization Engineer evaluates scenarios, validates plans, and identifies opportunities to improve value capture across the system. They translate optimization outputs into actionable insights while ensuring consistency in how models are applied and embedded into planning and execution processes.

Key Responsibilities

• Leads development of optimized regional and cross-regional production plans using LP models, balancing operational constraints, market conditions, and value chain opportunities across multiple refineries.
• Serves as a subject matter expert in refinery planning and optimization, applying broad knowledge of refinery operations, economics, and market dynamics across multiple refineries and value chain functions.
• Provides technical leadership for LP model development and optimization, challenging assumptions, refining and regional constraints, and ensuring models accurately reflect business and operational realities.
• Drives development of regional and cross-regional optimization strategies, aligning stakeholders to address constraints, capture value opportunities, and maximize value chain performance.
• Guides complex scenario and sensitivity analyses to support critical planning decisions, evaluate risks, and optimize performance.
• Leads advanced performance assessments, backcast analyses, and scenario evaluations to identify systemic gaps and drive continuous improvement initiatives.
• Leads collaboration across Operations, Commercial, Logistics, and Planning organizations to align assumptions, operating strategies, and optimization recommendations.
• Leads complex planning and optimization initiatives, mentors' other advisors, and advances planning and optimization capabilities across the organization.

Education And Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering required. A Bachelor's degree in another field may be considered with five (5) years of experience in refinery planning, optimization, value chain, operations, commercial, logistics or related technical experience required.
• Four (4) years of refinery planning, optimization, value chain analysis, operations, commercial, logistics, or related experience required.
• Aspen PIMS linear programming user background preferred.

Skills

• Analytical Thinking:
  Strong problem-solving skills to identify…