Automation & Controls Engineer

Your Mission 

Your mission is to build a materials science company for sustainable building materials. With Trusscore’s meteoric growth over the past several years, the scale and scope of new processes and systems has expanded significantly. As an Automation & Controls Engineer, you will introduce new and optimize existing automated systems and production cells to improve manufacturing ease, quality, capacity, efficiency, and sustainability. Your results will directly drive a company-wide Industry 4.0 transformation across all factories.   

You will use your own direct efforts, work alongside a cross-functional team, and coordinate with external integrators and vendors to design, develop, and commission automation systems. You will create code that interacts with primary and secondary manufacturing systems, such as extrusion production lines, material/product handling and conveyance, robots, part marking, machine vision, metrology, part stacking and packaging, data digitization, and other auxiliary equipment.  

This role requires you to be both strategic and tactical, executing alongside other team members. It requires broad background experience and will further stretch your aptitude in automation and controls engineering, data engineering, manufacturing and quality systems, project management, and communicating with internal & external stakeholders. Your success will be defined in terms of the quality and timeliness of driving projects to completion. 

Join our mission and be a part of a team that is re-imagining sustainable building materials innovations and bringing them to the physical world. 

Responsibilities 

• Work with R&D, manufacturing, and quality teams to identify automation needs and opportunities, conceptualize automation architectures and requirements, provide design for manufacturing (DFM) automation feedback, evaluate implementation risks, analyze new technology capabilities, and create proof of concepts where necessary

• Negotiate with key cross-functional stakeholders to reach consensus on the problem statement, requirements, proposed solutions, and deliverables without compromising the overall quality and timeliness of execution on automation projects; carefully balance product specifications, process requirements, layout, cost, and lead time

• Work with key cross-functional stakeholders to create technical requirements/RFP packages, assess capabilities of automation integrators, support integrator activities, and estimate automation costs and capabilities

• Participate in design reviews, review control logic and programming, and define qualification requirements for factory acceptance and site acceptance testing (FAT/SAT)

• Provide onsite technical support of automation systems at FAT/SAT and upon operationalizing systems in production

• Architect, write, and debug PLC code that will interact with primary and secondary manufacturing systems with an emphasis on generating code that is organized, structured, documented, maintainable and reusable

• Design HMIs that make complex machines easy to understand, control and troubleshoot

• Lay out new electrical control panels compliant to standards for industrial machinery, and create electrical, pneumatic and fluid schematics

• Train maintenance and manufacturing teams how to operate and support automation systems after deployment into operation

• Create machine interactions with plant-wide Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to communicate product acceptability, machine status, and process parameters

Skills & Qualifications 

• Post-secondary degree or diploma in engineering or applied sciences technology (electrical, mechatronics, computer, automation, robotics) or equivalent
• 3+ years of industrial experience in design and commissioning of automation, robotic cells, factory floor layouts, controls systems, and complex system architectures for industrial/mass production applications
• Ability to reconcile DFM feedback with design goals, anticipate risk and identify mitigation opportunities, drive root cause/corrective action and process optimization activities to closure
• Expertise with PLCs (with emphasis on but not limited to Allen Bradley) and various PLC programming languages, including Ladder Diagram, Structured Text and Function Block Diagrams and simulations
• HMI and SCADA programming and systems development experience
• Exposure to a wide variety of production machinery, industrial sensors, machine vision (e.g., cameras, lighting, programming), motion control (e.g., actuators, motors, pneumatics), and secondary production systems (e.g., part marking, product stacking and packaging, metrology, data digitization)
• Experience in a variety of robotic applications with major robotic brands (e.g., ABB, Kuka, Fanuc), and their programming and simulation packages or equivalents
• Field bus networks, serial communication, and Ethernet communication protocols like OPC-UA, Modbus, TCP and ethernet IP
• Electrical schematic CAD experience with AutoCAD, EPlan, or other drafting software
• Hands on experience building and commissioning electrical control panels and electro-mechanical systems
• Knowledge of UL508A, NFPA 79, and other NEC and CSA relevant codes for control panels of industrial machinery
• C#, .NET, python and/or SQL experience considered an asset

Employment Type: Full-time 

Work Location:  Palmerston, Ontario 

• Hybrid working from the office and from home until such time as return to the office company policies change
• Travel will be required to support operations at other Trusscore facilities, projects with integrators, contract manufacturers, vendor visits, or for other business reasons

Department: Research and Development 

Experience: Mid-level