OT Engineer - Controls & SCADA

TAR•Austin, TX

1d•Onsite

About The Position

TAR builds fully islanded, behind-the-meter microgrids (solar, BESS, and gas peakers) powering AI data centers in West Texas at record speed. As OT Engineer, you build the control system that runs the island, and the standard that makes the next island faster. You configure the microgrid controller and SCADA to spec, design the OT network and communications architecture underneath them, integrate every vendor's equipment into one coherent point database, verify all of it point by point before the plant carries load, and then keep it running for the life of the site. When the island transitions modes at 3 a.m. with a data center on the other side of the bus, it works because you tested it.

Requirements

BSEE, controls engineering, or related STEM discipline. Equivalent field experience considered.
2+ years in industrial or utility controls in energy, utilities, or generation environments, with hands-on ownership of SCADA systems, RTU and gateway configuration, and the networks underneath them in an energized environment.
Configuration depth in at least one microgrid controller, EMS, DERMS, or automation platform (SEL RTAC, Ignition, Rockwell, Siemens, or similar), plus the relay tooling that goes with it (AcSELerator, EnerVista, PCM600, DIGSI).
Protocol fluency at the packet level, not the datasheet level: Modbus, DNP3, IEC 61850 MMS and GOOSE, OPC UA. Wireshark and a protocol test set (Triangle MicroWorks, ASE-2000, IEDScout) are daily tools, not things you have heard of.
Hardened industrial networking: managed switching, fiber and loss budgets, ring and parallel redundancy, VLAN and QoS design, precision time distribution.
Experience delivering telemetry and remote monitoring at scale, and integrating RTUs, substations, and field devices into a coherent operational picture.
Able to read a one-line, a three-line, and an AC/DC schematic, and to say out loud what a mismapped control point will physically do to a breaker.
Understands islanded operation well enough to be useful about it: why fault current collapses without a utility, why that changes which protection can be trusted, and which functions therefore cannot tolerate a polled scan rate.
Extreme attention to detail with a bias for speed and rapid iteration, and the instinct to treat a change on a live island as an operational event rather than a ticket.

Nice To Haves

Direct islanded, off-grid, or BTM microgrid commissioning experience.
Control centre or enterprise SCADA background at a utility (ADMS, DMS, or NMS), or fleet-scale SCADA across many sites.
DERMS or distributed energy resource coordination, and renewable plus BESS integration projects.
An IEC 61850 GOOSE-based fast load shed or transfer scheme you designed, tested, and put in service.
Hardware-in-the-loop validation of microgrid or inverter controls.
Historian and time-series depth (AVEVA PI, Canary, Ignition), including one-way OT-to-cloud data architecture.
Data center facility controls exposure: BMS, DCIM, or hyperscale commissioning.
OT cyber security programme experience, or GICSP, ISA/IEC 62443, or comparable credentials.
Test-like-you-fly culture (Tesla Energy, Fluence, SEL, Emerson, or comparable) where validation rigor is the norm.

Responsibilities

Define and implement the OT communications strategy. Hardened managed Ethernet and the fiber plant that carries it, RTU and gateway integration, collector substation and switchgear connectivity, redundancy that fails over inside the time budget rather than eventually (PRP/HSR, MRP, RSTP), VLAN segmentation and QoS, and time synchronization (PTP per IEC 61850-9-3, IRIG-B) accurate enough that sequence-of-events records are worth reading after an event.
Engineer every communication path against its latency budget, not its convenience. Know which functions can live on polled Modbus, which require IEC 61850 GOOSE, and which belong on a hardwired contact that answers to no switch. Fast load shed and unplanned-island response are measured in cycles; specify, build, and prove them accordingly.
Own multi-vendor protocol integration. Interface control documents and point lists for PV inverters, BESS PCS and BMS, gensets, switchgear and relays, metering, and the facility BMS and DCIM, across Modbus TCP and SunSpec, IEC 61850 (MMS, GOOSE, 7-420), DNP3 and IEEE 1815.1, OPC UA, IEC 60870-5-104, and CAN. Write the protocol and point-list requirements into the RFP so integration gaps surface during procurement instead of during bring-up.
Deliver real-time telemetry, monitoring, and fleet visibility. Local authoritative historian sized for high-resolution telemetry, settlement-quality metering paths, store-and-forward that survives link loss, a remote operations view that works across sites as the fleet grows, and a one-way egress boundary for analytics that no external system can initiate a connection through. Apply IEC 62443 zones and conduits to the plant as built, not as drawn.
Commission it, then own it, and lead the workstream. Simulate DERs and the utility-absent case on the bench, prove redundancy by breaking it, support HIL validation before energization, then verify every point end to end in both directions in the field with real equipment operation. Own the as-built package, version-controlled baselines, patch windows planned around an island that cannot simply be taken offline, spares, and on-call. Provide the technical direction that OEM and integrator controls teams build against.