Senior Operational Technology Systems Engineer

Description

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.