Co-Op, SCADA Engineer

Lila Sciences • Cambridge, MA

7d • Onsite

About The Position

As a co-op on Lila Sciences’ Hardware & Controls Engineering team, the SCADA Engineer will build a unified, live view of the health and connectivity of Lila’s SCADA infrastructure. The system spans cloud and on-premise components, including Ignition gateways on EC2, a historian on RDS PostgreSQL, MQTT brokers, and edge nodes at each site. The work includes creating a connectivity diagram with link status and last-seen timestamps, and dashboards covering database, gateway, and edge-node health. The work is read-only, with read-only AWS access and SELECT-only database access.

The co-op will work alongside controls engineers and the IT/OT team at Lila’s Alewife site in Cambridge. The position offers exposure to AWS, Linux, industrial networking, Ignition, and data visualization, and includes documenting the setup so the team can extend and maintain it after the co-op term.

Requirements

• Pursuing a bachelor's or master's degree in engineering, computer science, or a related field.
• Available full time for the Spring 2027 co-op term, on-site at Alewife.
• Proficiency in Python for scripting and data collection.
• Comfortable working in Linux from the command line.
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals, including IP addressing, subnets, ports, and routing.
• Clear written communication for documenting dashboards and findings.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to AWS, particularly EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, or IAM.
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, or similar observability tooling.
• Familiarity with Ignition, MQTT or Sparkplug, or other industrial SCADA tooling.
• JavaScript or React experience, useful for building inside Ignition Perspective.

Responsibilities

• Build a live topology view of edge nodes, brokers, gateways, and databases, including per-link status and last-seen timestamps.
• Dashboard RDS PostgreSQL health, including CPU, memory, storage growth, connection counts, replication lag, and slow queries.
• Dashboard Ignition gateway and EC2 metrics, including JVM heap, tag quality, Sparkplug birth and death rates, and scan timing.
• Monitor on-premise edge nodes for reachability, uptime, resource use, and last publish time.
• Integrate existing sources, including CloudWatch, Performance Insights, Ignition gateway metrics, and broker status, into one interface.
• Document the setup so the team can extend and maintain it after the term ends.

What This Job Offers

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