Senior Operational Technology Systems Engineer

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.