Co-Op, SCADA Engineer

Lila Sciences • Cambridge, MA

6d • Onsite

About The Position

As a co-op on Lila Sciences’ Hardware & Controls Engineering team, you will build a unified monitoring view for the company’s SCADA system, which spans cloud and on-premise infrastructure. The system includes Ignition gateways on EC2, a historian on RDS PostgreSQL, MQTT brokers, and edge nodes at each site. The work will provide a live connectivity diagram showing system components, link status, and last-seen timestamps, supported by dashboards for database, gateway, and edge-node health.

The work is read-only, using read-only AWS access and SELECT-only database access. Based on-site at the Alewife location in Cambridge, you will work alongside controls engineers and the IT/OT team and gain exposure to AWS, Linux, industrial networking, Ignition, and data visualization. You will also document the monitoring setup so the team can maintain and extend it after the co-op term.

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ by combining advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments to execute the scientific method autonomously and accelerate discovery across medicine, materials, and energy. Its stated core values are truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity.

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 and able to work on-site at Alewife.
• Proficiency in Python for scripting and data collection.
• Comfort 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.
• Surface RDS PostgreSQL health metrics, 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-node 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 co-op term ends.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed