Construction Process Optimization Engineer

TAR•Austin, TX

2d•Onsite

About The Position

TAR builds fully islanded solar and storage campuses that power AI data centers, and at GW scale the binding constraint is field labor: how fast crews can install a campus. As Construction Process Optimization Engineer, you own installation productivity on the ground, embedded with our EPC and their crews through the build of our first campus. The problem has two halves: the install itself, which covers pile driving, racking assembly, module mounting, and BESS and electrical placement, and the logistics around it, which covers delivery sequencing, laydown yards, staging, kitting, and the QA that keeps rework near zero. Much of the work is empirical: try a method, measure it, keep it or kill it, then turn what wins into the standard playbook every future campus starts with on day one. This is a senior, field-heavy role: you will spend extensive time living at our West Texas site during construction campaigns, with Austin as your home base.

Requirements

5+ years in process or industrial engineering, construction execution, or capital projects, with substantial time in the field rather than behind a desk.
Hands-on construction project experience on the EPC side, the owner's side, or in construction-focused consulting, with a feel for how field work actually flows and what makes an improvement stick and repeat at scale.
A measurement-first toolkit: time studies, takt and line-of-balance, lean methods, work sampling, and bottleneck analysis, plus the data skills to back it up (Excel required; Python or SQL a plus).
Comfort spending extended stretches at a remote West Texas site and the temperament to earn credibility with field crews.
A builder's bias: you would rather run the experiment this week than write the memo about it.

Nice To Haves

Utility-scale solar or BESS construction experience.
Background in oil and gas, petrochemical, or manufacturing operations, or in operations and manufacturing consulting (shop-floor productivity, capital projects, ops transformation); the systems-and-measurement mindset matters more than the industry.
Experience with construction robotics, survey automation, or GPS/RTK layout tools.
Texas PE license or OSHA 30.
Spanish proficiency.

Responsibilities

Run structured time-and-motion studies across every major installation activity (piles, racking, module install, DC collection, BESS placement) and build TAR's productivity baseline: cycle times, crew-hours per activity, and MW per week.
Identify the true bottlenecks and quantify what each one costs in schedule and dollars, so the team acts on the constraints that matter.
Design and run field experiments on crew size, sequencing, staging, and method, then measure results and standardize the winners into repeatable work.
Solve the recurring physical problems (panel laydown, material handling, work-front congestion) with methods that hold up at scale, not one-off fixes.
Build the material logistics system from scratch: delivery cadence, laydown plans, kitting, and staging distances, so crews are never waiting on material at the work front.
Stand up the QA/QC process around installation that catches issues before they turn into rework.
Codify everything into standard work (playbooks, productivity targets, training material) and train EPC crews on TAR-specific methods, including robot-assisted survey and layout, partnering with our robotics team as more automation reaches the field.
Feed constructability findings back into engineering and procurement so the next campus is designed to build faster than the first.