Automation Engineering Manager (ub0001)

About Charm

Our mission is to return the atmosphere to 280 ppm CO₂. We convert excess inedible biomass into carbon-rich bio-oil and inject it into underground storage for permanent carbon removal. At scale we can use bio-oil to make fossil-free iron.

Our carbon removal pathway took off in 2020 with initial purchases from customers like Stripe, Shopify & Microsoft. Since then we’ve scaled to thousands of tons of carbon removal, over a hundred employees, and now have three locations in San Francisco, Colorado, and Kansas. Come join us in 2024 as we aim to become one of the first companies to put 10,000 tons of carbon back underground!

We're looking to expand our team of ambitious creative and hands-on forward-thinking humans. We value psychological safety and collaboration. We take calculated risks and don't sweep mistakes under the rug; instead, we pin them to the wall and learn from them. We value that everyone’s unique backgrounds and perspectives shape their work. We encourage you to read our company values.

Come help us reverse climate change. Gigatons or bust!

About the Role

We’re looking for an Automation Engineering Manager to lead our team of automation and controls engineers to bring electromechanical equipment online quickly using best industrial automation practices.  The first and foremost need is to assist in automating our budding pyrolyzer fleet in Colorado, which also requires some plant level logic and integration. The scope of automation at Charm includes both our testing equipment and our operations equipment.

You will be responsible for the design and implementation of SCADA systems to serve as the monitoring and control interface for our operations team. You will work closely with our project teams to properly scope automation work, and support your team of engineers in turning that scope a reality. This will likely include selecting new sensors to up level our ability to do closed loop control on the key performance indicators that matter to us, like carbon content in bio oil and syngas emissions. You will align best practices across the team of automation engineers.  

You will build a team that can meet the automation and controls needs of our engineering and operations teams efficiently and effectively. This team will be across state lines with some travel.

Responsibilities:

• Develop an automation architecture for our first of kind pyrolyzer plant in CO, that will include thousands of different data points and nearly one hundred PLCs communicating flawlessly.
• Ensure the rest of the engineering team has easy access to data acquisition software, and an easy way to visualize the state of the systems.
• Integrate with operations tech stack to provide data like uptime.
• Lead the automation engineering team by building a prioritized roadmap based on company priorities, ensuring proper staffing to projects and adherence to deadlines, and executing on those priorities to keep our systems online.
• Ensure that the fidelity of the solution always meets the problem – know whether a project is an R&D project with several iterations before hitting production or whether you’re building something for our 24/7 operations team.
• Close the gap between a need identified for automation and controls and the time it takes to execute the work by building processes to enhance this metric.
• Develop a team of highly competent and curious automation and controls engineers.

Requirements:

• Technical depth on setting up automation, controls, and networking infrastructure at a plant scale to help guide the team on architecture decisions as well as best practices as we embark on our first of kind plant.
• Ability to synthesize the operational experience into automation and controls improvements via observation and conversations with the operations team.
• Proven ability to design and implement effective dashboards for monitoring and control at the plant scale, with an emphasis on reducing the number of operators needed to run the plant.
• Prior experience leading a fast-paced functional team through a myriad of different rapidly changing priorities.
• An ability to scope project fidelity based on the end customer (R&D equipment vs operations equipment requiring different fidelity, but always prioritizing safety).
• Minimum of a Bachelor's Degree required.
• If located in CA, will need to be willing to travel up to 50% of the year
• An eagerness to level up our automation, controls, and electrical engineering teams.

Bonus (but not required):

• Familiarity with ignition, codesys based PLC languages