(Sr.) Controls Engineer

Company Summary:

Chromatan Inc is dedicated to empowering biopharmaceutical manufacturers with our cutting-edge, columnless single-use continuous chromatography platform, offering enhanced flexibility, scalability, and purity, reducing downtime and resin consumption, and maximizing productivity for the cost-effective production of life-saving therapies.

Position Summary:

As a Controls Engineer at ChromaTan, you will have the opportunity to work on industrial control solutions for an innovative biologics purification platform using a wide range of technologies. This is a mid-level position so candidates who do not have experience with all of the listed technologies are welcome as long as they are willing and able to learn new technologies with limited instruction, candidates must be strong self-starters and able to learn new skills and augment existing skills, as well as being able to mentor junior level employees through difficult challenges.

Responsibilities:

• Conducting initial commissioning and factory acceptance testing of newly fabricated systems. This includes command line interaction with a FreeBSD operating system using an internal guide to install dependencies, configure firewall rules, configure PostgreSQL databases, and manage hard drives.

• Maintaining and developing automated internal equipment using Beckhoff TwinCAT 3.

• Wiring new control panels for short run prototype and engineering sample products which cannot reasonably be sent out to a fabricator.

• Conducting experiments to qualify potential system components in a scientific and methodological way.

• Independently designing and developing electrical panels and software for “add-on” systems for the main product line. These “add-on” systems are typically small in scope and consist of fewer than 10 total IO components.

• Working collaboratively using GitHub to facilitate upgrades to system controls.

• Developing new control systems in collaboration with the Senior Software Engineer to accommodate future additions to the main product line.

• As more systems are delivered to customers, the Controls Engineer should be the first line of field support for problems impacting the systems’ software and electrical controls. Expected travel time is less than 10%, subject to change to no more than 25% based on demand for systems.

Requirements

• A strong candidate will have a grasp of PLC coding, with an understanding of basic to intermediate software development concepts including object-oriented design, pointers, asynchronous functions, and interactions with SQL databases. Candidates with experience with some traditional computer programming languages, as well as ladder logic or structured text preferred.

• Candidate must be able to think through ways in which end users may misuse their work products and conduct their development with the objective of maximizing ease of use for the operator / user.

• Candidate must be open minded to, and mentally invested in, the ways in which their solutions interface with professionals in other engineering and scientific disciplines.

• Strong experience with hardware design and integration of electro-mechanical assemblies, troubleshooting integration and PLC rack design / development

• We would like someone who has exposure to systems and database administration, however if they lack the relevant experience the Controls Engineer will be expected to learn enough about these topics to facilitate OS and Database user administration, certificate exchange for OPC UA connections, and commissioning and maintenance of databases for use with prototype and internal test apparatus.