Controls Engineer

Controls Engineer

Position Type: Direct Hire

Position Location: Libertyville, IL

Position Salary: $120,000 – $165,000 (Depending on Experience)

Responsibilities:

• The Controls Engineer will provide leadership and technical expertise in the areas of controls and electronic circuitry to achieve launch date, as well as safety, quality, and productivity targets in a new medical device manufacturing plant.
• Initial focus will be specification through commissioning of new high volume medical device assembly equipment, machine networks and SCADA system.
• Role will transition to focus on controls improvements and troubleshooting of high volume automated medical device assembly equipment and associated electrical wiring/devices, instrument, embedded systems, motion control and inspection systems.
• In addition, it is expected that this individual will assist and provide training to maintenance, production or other personnel as needed with technical or troubleshooting.
• The selected candidate will be skilled in the design/specification, installation, and upkeep of PLC and PC based controls in a manufacturing environment.
• Developing specifications and user requirements for controls, communication and SCADA systems for high volume medical device assembly and material handling equipment.
• Oversee electrical/controls design and build by machine OEMs to assure machine is built to specifications and meets safety and performance requirements.
• Support installation, FAT/SAT, validation and commissioning of assembly and material handling equipment.
• Lead or support maintenance teams in troubleshooting problems resulting in downtime or quality issues. Identify and correct causes of chronic equipment failures or issues.
• Develop and implement plan to achieve highly effective controls troubleshooting and repair, minimizing downtime.
• Manage control of machine software, firmware and user access security.
• Propose, evaluate risk and implement PLC program and other software/firmware or hardware changes needed to improve safety, yield and productivity.
• Completing change control documentation, including change documentation, risk assessment and justification.
• Optimize and/or improve human machine interfaces, SCADA systems and MES interfaces.
• Troubleshooting and optimizing performance of vision inspection systems
• Define equipment maintenance/preventative maintenance requirements and procedures.
• Identify root-causes of equipment failures, develop and implement corrective actions.
• Develop troubleshooting and repair skills of Controls and Automation Technicians.
• Provide expert on call support for system outages and major incidents.
• Work with Automation and Validation Engineers to develop test scripts to validate software/firmware updates for controls related changes.

Requirements:

• Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering or equivalent coupled with 7 years of experience in high volume industrial or manufacturing environment.
• Proficiency programming and troubleshooting Allen Bradley Control Logics PLCs and Human Machine Interface (HMI / GUI )
• Proficient user of: RSLOGIX5000, Logix Designer, Studio 5000, Factory Talk SE, Ignition and Cognex
• Demonstrated ability to design fault-tolerant systems with error handling and recovery.
• General understanding of factory LAN/WAN ethernet networks and ability to setup devices with IP addresses or nodes Experience setting up/tuning and troubleshooting Allen Bradley Power-Flex variable frequency drives and Kinetix multi-axis servo drives.
• Solid working knowledge of:
• Field bus Networks (ProfiNet,DeviceNet, Ethernet/IP, Safety rated field bus networks).
• Radio frequency identification devices (RFID) and all the accompanying components (Receiver, antenna, puck, reader)
• PID tunning and closed feedback loops
• Serial communication (RS-232, RS-422, RS-485, ProfiBus, Modbus RTU, Data Highway) between PLCs, instruments and microcontrollers
• Ethernet communications between machine PLCs and embedded data collection systems
• Proficiency selecting appropriate circuit protectors, wire and cable, sensors, safety hardware, PLC hardware, remote I/O, VFD and instrumentation.
• Broad knowledge of controls devices and experience troubleshooting.
• Effective written and verbal communication skills.
• Equipment engineering experience within the medical device industry is highly desirable.
• Experience with Vision systems is a plus (Cognex, Keyence, Fanuc) is a plus
• Experience programming/troubleshooting Beckman or B&R (ABB) PLCs is a plus