MANUFACTURING POST DELIVERY ENGINEER

Align Production Systems • Decatur, IL

2d • $75,000 - $85,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Align Production Systems (APS) is a growing engineer-to-order and standard products capital equipment manufacturer specializing in automated guided vehicles, transporters, and material handling solutions. We build complex, high-value equipment for demanding industrial customers and support that equipment through its full lifecycle. Our Decatur facility is the primary manufacturing hub for the business. We are growing and we are looking for the right person to grow with us.

The Manufacturing Applications Engineer is a newly created position based full-time at our Decatur, Illinois manufacturing facility. This is not a design desk role. It is a hands-on, plant-floor-present engineering position that sits at the intersection of manufacturing execution, post-delivery customer support, and hydraulic systems. You will be the engineering presence in Decatur, the bridge between our St. Louis engineering team and the Decatur floor, and the primary engineering resource for everything that happens after a unit ships.

This role reports to the Plant Manager for day-to-day plant and aftermarket coordination, with a dotted line to the Director of Engineering Operations in St. Louis. You will attend daily engineering standups with the St. Louis team by video and travel to St. Louis a minimum of once per month for in-person design standards alignment and team integration. You will be assigned a Philippines-based engineering partner for drawing and documentation support.

Requirements

• Mechanical engineering degree
• Strong communication skills with comfort operating as a semi-remote team member relative to the primary engineering organization
• Self-directed, proactive, and disciplined about staying connected to a team you are not physically sitting with every day
• Ability to learn complex custom equipment quickly and earn the trust of both the manufacturing team and the engineering team you serve as a bridge between

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a custom or engineer-to-order manufacturing environment
• Hydraulics exposure of any kind, coursework, project experience, or field exposure
• Familiarity with AGVs, transporters, or material handling equipment
• Experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, or similar CAD environments
• Prior experience in a field service, applications engineering, or plant engineering role

Responsibilities

• Review every engineering release destined for the Decatur floor before manufacturing begins to ensure drawings, BOMs, and documentation are complete and build-ready.
• Act as the day-to-day bridge between the St. Louis engineering team and the Decatur manufacturing floor, handling technical questions, clarifications, and in-process engineering decisions.
• Develop competency in reading and interpreting hydraulic schematics, supporting component selection, and troubleshooting hydraulic systems on the floor and in the field, with the long-term expectation of becoming the go-to hydraulics resource at the Decatur facility.
• Serve as the first engineering resource for post-delivery customer issues, including warranty investigations, field fixes, retrofit scopes, and controls and hydraulic integration questions, owning the investigation, documentation, and resolution.
• Escalate issues exceeding a defined complexity threshold or requiring more than approximately 40 hours of engineering effort to the St. Louis engineering team, managing their engagement to ensure customer outcome.
• Build and maintain a post-delivery engineering knowledge base, documenting field issues, root causes, and resolutions.
• Provide plant-floor technical support to the Decatur manufacturing team for build questions, in-process engineering decisions, and technical investigations.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level