Controls & Startup Engineer

Controls & Startup Engineer

This is a high-travel field engineering role — expect up to 75% travel to project sites and operating plants in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, often for consecutive weeks at a time. The role is fully remote when not traveling; however, candidates must reside in the Eastern or Central time zone and within reasonable proximity to a major airport to support site schedules and travel logistics.

The Controls & Startup Engineer is the hands-on automation lead in the field for the commissioning, startup, and ongoing support of Seven Seas Water's water treatment and desalination plants. This is not a troubleshoot-only position: the successful candidate writes, modifies, and commissions PLC and HMI code — authoring new routines, restructuring logic, and building operator screens — in addition to diagnosing and resolving electrical, controls, instrumentation, and network issues on live plants.

The ideal candidate is a jack-of-all-trades field engineer: comfortable going online with a running PLC one hour and pulling wire diagrams, landing terminations, or configuring a managed switch the next. Experience in seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) or brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) desalination is a plus, but not required.

Essential duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• PLC programming:
  Program, modify, commission, and troubleshoot Allen-Bradley Logix PLC systems using Studio 5000, including authoring new routines, Add-On Instructions, and device logic — not limited to online monitoring or forcing.
• HMI/SCADA:
  Develop, modify, and commission Factory Talk View SE/ME applications, including displays, alarms, and tag structures; support Wonderware/AVEVA and other legacy HMI platforms encountered in the installed fleet.
• Startup and commissioning:
  Lead the electrical and controls portions of plant startups: point-to-point I/O checkout, loop checks, instrument calibration verification, motor bumps, VFD configuration and tuning (Allen-Bradley Power Flex, Square D Altivar), interlock and permissive verification, and functional testing through wet commissioning and performance testing.
• Industrial networking:
  Configure and troubleshoot plant control networks — Ether Net/IP, Modbus TCP, managed switches, VLANs, firewalls, and remote-access/VPN connections supporting Seven Seas remote monitoring of plants.
• Panel modifications:
  Perform and supervise field modifications to industrial control panels: adding I/O, rewiring circuits, replacing components, and redlining schematics, maintaining compliance with UL 508A practices and NFPA 70 (NEC).
• Electrical maintenance:
  Safely maintain, troubleshoot, and repair plant electrical equipment (480 V and below) including MCCs, VFDs, motor circuits, distribution panels, and control power systems, in accordance with NFPA 70E electrically safe work practices, arc flash requirements, and lockout/tagout procedures.
• Troubleshooting:
  Diagnose electrical, controls, instrumentation, and communication failures on operating plants — on-site and remotely — and implement corrective actions that prevent recurrence.
• Documentation:
  Redline drawings in the field and return accurate as-built markups (schematics, loop diagrams, panel layouts, network diagrams) to the engineering office; document work performed in service reports.
• Remote support:
  Provide remote troubleshooting support to plant operations teams and participate in an informal on-call rotation for critical plant issues.
• Operator training:
  Train plant operators and technicians on control system operation, alarm response, and safe equipment usage.
• Contractor coordination:
  Work directly with electrical contractors, OEM service technicians, and customer personnel during installation and startup; coordinate and supervise contractor work scopes in the field.
• Continuous improvement:
  Feed field lessons learned back to the engineering team, including suggested design and standards improvements.

Required qualifications:

• Hands-on PLC programming:
  Demonstrated ability to write PLC programs from scratch — candidates should be prepared to walk through programs they have…