System Engineer

Systems Engineer, two levels

Make your application after reading the following skill and qualification requirements for this position.

Location: North Louisiana office preferred, or remote-based anywhere across the South Central US, with 30–50% travel across the region.

Salary: Up to $120,000 depending on level and experience, plus a year end profit share

Schedule: Full time, permanent, with travel to client sites

If you build in Ignition and are based anywhere across the South Central US, this is a rare opportunity to work on manufacturing intelligence projects without needing to relocate outside the region.

The company is a vendor-independent automation and manufacturing intelligence integrator, working with industrial clients since the mid-1990s. They are an Inductive Automation Premier Integrator, the platform's top partner tier, and have developed and sell their own manufacturing execution system (MES), built natively on Ignition.

They are expanding their Manufacturing Intelligence team and hiring at two levels. One position sits on the architect side, designing how solutions are built and integrated across client systems. The other is focused on deployment, building those solutions and getting them running on site. The level will depend on your hands-on experience and level of ownership, rather than simply your job title or years of experience, so the conversation is relevant whether your background is more architecture or deployment focused.

What you'll do

The platform is Ignition. On the architect side, turn functional requirements into a real design: how the system is structured, how it integrates with historians, MES, ERP and the PLCs underneath, where the data lands and how it stays maintainable. Produce the diagrams and interface specifications, make the calls on APIs, OPC UA and MQTT, guide the database architecture, and act as technical authority on your projects. On the deployment side, build to those designs, do the tag and UDT work, write the SQL and the scripting, and go to site to get it running. Both seats spend real time on plant floors, across pulp and paper, specialty chemicals, life sciences, food and beverage and discrete manufacturing.

What you'll need

Hands on Ignition is the first thing, alongside SQL you have written yourself and a real understanding of how plant data gets from a PLC to somewhere someone can use it. For the architect seat, around eight years in industrial automation, controls, SCADA or manufacturing intelligence, at least one project where you owned the design, and scripting in Python or Java. For the deployment seat, two to five years building and deploying automation or MI applications is the level.

Inductive Automation certification is welcome and can be sponsored. MES, historian, MQTT, Docker, Azure and CI/CD all count. A degree helps but equivalent experience is fine. You do not need to tick every box.

Why this role is worth considering

Most of the serious Ignition and manufacturing intelligence work in the US sits in the midwest, the Texas metros and the southeast. This is a genuine MI seat in the Gulf south, at a company growing the office rather than maintaining it, so someone joining now has real influence over how the team works.

Reasons engineers join include:

• Ignition led work at a Premier Integrator, including development on their own MES product
• Two levels open at once, so the role flexes to where you actually are
• A year end profit share on top of base, with only one missed year in recent history
• 401k with match, financial wellness support, generous PTO and parental leave
• Vendor independence, so broad technical exposure across sectors and platforms
• A short, direct hiring process straight to the hiring manager

The working setup

The team would like you based out of their north Louisiana office, on a university campus in a low cost college town about an hour from a regional airport. The salary goes a good deal further there than in Houston or Dallas, and relocation support is available. If you are already elsewhere in the south central US, that works too. Travel to client sites runs in the region of 30 to 50%, weekly pattern rather than long stints away.

The kind of person who will do well

This suits an engineer who treats Ignition as a platform rather than an HMI tool, is comfortable on a plant floor, and stays steady when project priorities move. xhyhwjd If you need a fully remote role with no travel, or your Ignition experience is building screens to someone else's design with nothing underneath, this will not be the right fit.

If that sounds like your kind of work, get in touch and we can talk it through.