Senior Ignition / SCADA Systems Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Nexus Circular is the commercial leader in advanced recycling technology that converts landfill-bound plastics into circular feedstocks for the production of sustainable virgin plastics for packaging and other applications.  Nexus Circular’s end-to-end solution is economically validated as demonstrated by consistent bulk sales of high quality, ISCC Plus circular feedstocks for virgin plastic production.  Aligned with global partners who seek proven scalable solutions to meet ambitious plastic circularity goals, Nexus Circular is rapidly expanding its innovation footprint worldwide, moving decisively to address the complex challenges of plastics accumulation in the environment.

Nexus Circular is seeking a senior Operational Technology professional with deep, hands-on experience administering, stabilizing, and scaling Inductive Automation Ignition environments in uptime-sensitive industrial operations.

This role will serve as a subject matter expert for Ignition, SCADA reliability, historian performance, and OT data integrity. The successful candidate will help reduce key-person risk, improve historian and data-logging stability, strengthen OT support practices, and establish repeatable Ignition platform standards for McDonough and future Nexus Circular sites.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate has personally owned and improved Ignition environments in live production settings. They are comfortable troubleshooting complex SCADA, historian, and OT data issues, but they can also step back and build standards, documentation, and support practices that make the platform more reliable and repeatable over time.

This person should be hands-on, structured, collaborative, and comfortable working in environments where uptime, operator visibility, and data reliability are critical.

Primary Responsibilities

Ignition Platform Ownership

• Own the health, administration, support, and continuous improvement of Ignition environments across production and non-production systems.
• Manage Ignition gateway configuration, module health, backup and restore readiness, redundancy strategy, performance tuning, and upgrade planning.
• Design and maintain standards for tag models, UDT structures, alarming, historian configuration, project organization, scripting, and release discipline.
• Support both Vision and Perspective applications where applicable, with a focus on operator clarity, diagnostics, maintainability, and long-term supportability.
• Establish change-control, testing, rollback, and production validation practices for Ignition changes.
• Follow best practices for developing scalable, maintainable, and intelligent UDT structures within Ignition.
• Provide technical guidance and knowledge transfer to internal teams on Ignition architecture, support procedures, troubleshooting methods, and platform standards.

SCADA, Historian, and OT Data Reliability

• Improve the reliability of historian logging, store-and-forward behavior, tag history, data retention, and time-series data quality.
• Troubleshoot issues related to Ignition gateways, PLC connectivity, HMIs, alarms, historian performance, and OT data flows.
• Support root-cause analysis and incident response for Ignition, SCADA, historian, and OT platform issues.
• Help define and maintain data reliability standards for production reporting, alerting, event streaming, and future analytics use cases.

Plant Integration, Support, and Standardization

• Work closely with OT, Engineering, Operations, Data, IT, and external vendors to support commissioning, startup, troubleshooting, and ongoing plant operations.
• Support integration with PLCs, HMIs, industrial devices, SQL databases, and other plant systems.
• Help define a repeatable OT platform model that can be applied at McDonough and future Nexus Circular sites.
• Create and maintain architecture diagrams, support runbooks, backup procedures, recovery documentation, known-failure scenarios, naming standards, and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Support OT Windows Server infrastructure related to Ignition and plant systems, including backup validation, patching coordination, recovery planning, and production support standards.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in OT, industrial automation, SCADA, or plant systems support, with senior-level ownership of production environments.
• 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, scripting, and upgrade planning.
• Strong experience with historian design or administration, OT data logging, data retention strategy, and time-series data reliability.
• Experience supporting OT Windows Server infrastructure, backup and restore validation, patching discipline, and production support practices.
• Strong troubleshooting, documentation, root-cause analysis, incident response, and cross-functional communication skills.
• Ability to work effectively with Operations, Engineering, OT, IT, Data, and external vendors in a production-focused environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ignition certification or equivalent expert-level Ignition experience.
• Experience supporting Ignition SCADA systems in industrial, production, or continuous-process environments.
• Hands-on experience with Vision, Perspective, SQL databases, scripting, Ignition API usage, alarm configuration, and performance troubleshooting.
• Experience in oil, chemicals, energy, recycling, industrial processing, manufacturing, or other continuous-process environments.
• Experience with Siemens, Rockwell, Phoenix Contact, Unitronics, or similar industrial control platforms.
• Experience supporting multi-site OT environments, standardized templates, plant replication, or commissioning of new facilities.
• Experience integrating OT data into reporting, alerting, event streaming, cloud analytics, or business intelligence platforms.
• Experience creating OT support runbooks, historian standards, naming standards, architecture documentation, and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Working knowledge of OT segmentation, remote access governance, firewalls, and industrial cybersecurity practices.
• Exposure to licensing, intellectual property protection, OT architecture standardization, or future-state plant replication models.