Manufacturing Data Systems Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

ION Storage Systems offers solid-state battery solutions that prioritize performance, safety, and durability. Focusing on a variety of portable and stationary energy storage applications, ION's patented, three-dimensional ceramics design offers a sustainable approach to next-generation energy storage. Built on a scalable, modular ceramic structure, ION's batteries are ready to meet the demands of an increasingly electrified world. We are backed by leading venture capital firms including Alsop Louie Partners, Clear Creek Investments, VoLo Earth Ventures, and Toyota Ventures.

We offer an inclusive environment with opportunities for growth, and we believe that a thriving workspace leads to a thriving company. We hope you will contact us to learn more and to be a part of our diverse, collaborative team!

We are seeking a full-time Manufacturing Data Systems Engineer to join our team in Beltsville, MD. This role owns the data platforms that run our manufacturing environment: the systems connecting our production lines, QC, cell development, cycling labs, equipment logging, analytics, and internal applications. You will design, build, and operate the pipelines, databases, orchestration, monitoring, and back-end services that move data off the production floor and out of the lab into the dashboards, models, and tools our scientists, engineers, and operators rely on every day. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who wants to own data in a manufacturing setting, not a generic big-data or data-science position. The right person is fluent on the IT/OT boundary, comfortable writing production code, maintaining existing systems, and partnering across data, IT/OT, and manufacturing teams, and uses agentic tools as a force multiplier across the full development lifecycle. The role is open to mid-level and senior candidates; we will level to fit.

Responsibilities:

• Own the data platforms for our manufacturing environment (SCADA, schema design, ETL/ELT orchestration, dashboards, and data governance) and serve as primary administrator for manufacturing business systems (MES, ERP, PLM, QMS), managing access, permissions, and configuration.

• Securely integrate manufacturing and lab systems including ceramic production, cell manufacturing, QC, and robotic systems, and the internal applications built around them.

• Build and operate back-end services, internal tools, and the platform layer (VMs, APIs, Docker/K8s, git, CI/CD, backups), drive incidents to resolution, and lead implementation of new manufacturing tools, coordinating upgrades, testing, validation, and deployment with vendors and stakeholders.

• Minimize single points of failure across the data stack through comprehensive documentation, backup/recovery procedures, cross-training, and engineering for maintainability.

• Partner with Executive, IT/OT, R&D, Engineering, and Operations stakeholders to scope work, plan deliveries, and roll out changes safely.

• Employ governed AI workflows across day-to-day engineering, including code generation, debugging, documentation, code review, and operational automation.

• Serve as the primary point of contact for manufacturing systems support, develop training materials, and conduct user training.

Required Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent hands-on experience in manufacturing, data engineering, and backend systems.

• 4+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production data systems, including SCADA (Ignition preferred), database schema design, ETL/ELT workflows and orchestration platforms, and dashboards.

• Direct experience managing data in a manufacturing or industrial environment, with an understanding of manufacturing processes and workflows, working with production, lab, sensor, or other equipment-generated data and bridging the gap between raw machine output and analytics-ready datasets.

• Hands-on experience with containerization, version control, and CI/CD workflows in a team setting.

• Demonstrated ownership of operational monitoring, logging, alerting, backup recovery, and incident response for production systems.

• Experience administering or supporting MES, ERP, PLM, QMS, or other manufacturing-traceability and production-operations platforms, and an understanding of the data they generate.

• Track record of maintaining and improving existing systems, not just building greenfield.

• Experience supporting cross-functional teams across Engineering, Operations, Quality, and Supply Chain.

• Experience creating reports, dashboards, and KPIs, and gathering requirements to drive process improvements through software systems.

Desirable Experience:

• Experience operating in hybrid environments that span on-prem infrastructure and cloud services (Azure preferred) and thoughtful about where each system belongs.

• Semantic models, dataflows, and downstream reporting infrastructure (Power BI preferred).

• Internal application development experience – data entry UIs, sample/run trackers, equipment dashboards, or workflow apps tied to production systems.

• Experience working in early-stage environments where you owned systems end-to-end.

• Experience with regulated, quality-sensitive, or audit-driven data workflows (e.g. QC, automotive, aerospace, defense, life sciences).

• Hands-on production use of AI coding assistants and/or agentic development tools with a clear point of view on where they help, where they don't, and how to use them responsibly.

• Experience building agentic workflows, LLM-backed services, or AI-driven automation into production data or operations systems (RAG over internal data, MCP servers, evals, prompt/tool design).

• Familiarity with specific platforms and tools used in our stack, such as Odoo ERP, MS SQL and Postgres queries and database structures, Dagster for data orchestration, and basic scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash).

Required Skills:

• Excellent critical thinking, problem-solving, and debugging skills, with discipline around documentation and continuous improvement.

• Self-motivated and able to take full ownership of critical systems, including the unglamorous maintenance work that keeps them running.

• Proactive in identifying and mitigating reliability, data-quality, and security risks.

• Strong written and verbal communication, comfortable with both technical deep-dives and stakeholder updates.

• Comfort working across IT/OT