Senior Operational Technology Systems Engineer - McDonough, GA

Nexus Circular is seeking a Subject Matter Expert in Operational Technology with deep, hands-on expertise in Inductive Automation Ignition, and OT data reliability. The ideal candidate is a senior OT/ Ignition specialist who has personally designed, administered, stabilized, and scaled Ignition gateway environments, and OT support standards in uptime-sensitive industrial operations.
The person in this role will help Nexus reduce key-person risk, improve historian and data-logging stability, strengthen Ignition support discipline, and establish a repeatable Ignition platform standard for McDonough and future site replication.
Primary Responsibilities
1. Ignition Platform Architecture & Administration

* Own the health, administration, support, and continuous improvement of the Ignition platform across production and non-production environments.

* Manage gateway configuration, module health, backup / restore readiness, redundancy strategy, performance tuning, and upgrade planning.

* Design and maintain standards for tag models, UDT structures, alarming, historian configuration, project organization, and release discipline.

* Support both Vision and Perspective environments where applicable, with focus on operator clarity, diagnostics, and maintainability.

* Establish change-control, testing, rollback, and production validation practices for all Ignition changes.

* Follow best practices and guidelines for developing intelligent UDT's for an Ignition system.

* Provide technical guidance and train others on systems, software, equipment, machines, procedures, and/or processes.

2. Plant Integration, Troubleshooting & Standardization

* Work closely with OT, Engineering, Operations, Data, and external vendors to resolve issues involving PLC connectivity, HMIs, historian logging, and OT data flows.

* Support commissioning, startup, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis tied to Ignition, historian, or OT platform behavior.

* Create and maintain architecture diagrams, support runbooks, backup procedures, known-failure scenarios, and recovery documentation.

* Help define the repeatable OT platform standard that Nexus can use at McDonough and future sites.

Required Qualifications

* 5+ years of experience in OT, industrial automation, or plant systems support, with clear senior-level ownership of production environments in an ignition environment

* 3+ years of direct, hands-on experience administering and troubleshooting Inductive Automation Ignition in live industrial operations.

* Demonstrated expertise with Ignition gateway administration, tags / UDTs, alarming, Tag Historian, store-and-forward, backups, redundancy, and upgrade planning.

* Strong experience with historian design or administration, OT data logging, retention strategy, and time-series data reliability.

* Prior experience supporting OT Windows server infrastructure, backup / restore validation, patching discipline, and production support standards.

* Strong documentation, root-cause analysis, incident response, and cross-functional communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

* Ignition certification or equivalent demonstrable expert-level Ignition experience.

* Hands-on with Ignition projects supporting Ignition in OT environment or industrial application workloads, including performance troubleshooting and operational maintenance.

* Experience in Oil, Chemicals, Energy, recycling, industrial processing, Production, or other continuous-process environments.

* Provide support and enhancements of an existing Ignition SCADA system, SQL database, Vision & Perspective screens, and Scripts.

* Configuring Alarms to meet Industry Guidelines and Developing scripts using the Ignition API

* Experience with Siemens, Rockwell, Phoenix Contact, Unitronics, or similar industrial platforms.

* Experience with multi-site OT environments, plant replication, standardized templates, or commissioning new facilities.

* Experience integrating OT data into reporting, alerting, event streaming, or cloud analytics platforms.

* Experience creating OT support runbooks, historian standards, naming standards, and knowledge-transfer documentation.

* Exposure to licensing/IP-protection considerations, OT architecture standardization, or future-state plant replication model.

* Working knowledge of OT segmentation, remote access governance, firewalls, and security practices appropriate for industrial environments.