Senior Substation Automation Engineer - Grid Modernization

Black & Veatch Family of Companies•Orlando, FL

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role offers the opportunity to lead the transition of IEC 61850‑based digital and virtual substations from pilot to production, influencing real-world grid modernization outcomes. The Senior Substation Automation Engineer will design and standardize secure, vendor‑agnostic substation automation architectures to enhance resilience, flexibility, and scalability. Serving as a technical leader and subject‑matter expert, this individual will influence system architecture, best practices, and emerging standards, collaborating with utilities, technology partners, and industry groups (including vPAC Alliance) to define the future of protection, automation, and control. Black & Veatch is expanding its Power SCADA team to support a strategic grid modernization initiative focused on IEC 61850‑based substation automation and virtual substation technologies. As a founding member of the Virtual Protection, Automation, and Control (vPAC) Alliance, Black & Veatch is collaborating with industry leaders to advance open, secure, and vendor‑agnostic digital substation solutions that replace traditional, hardware‑intensive architectures with virtualized, software‑defined platforms. Following successful pilot efforts, BV is now transitioning virtual substations into production environments. This role is being created to bring in experienced SCADA professionals who can help design, implement, standardize, and support production‑ready Power SCADA solutions that enable resilient, flexible, and future‑ready grid infrastructure.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Engineering from either a recognized accredited program in their home country or the country in which the professional is practicing or equivalent experience in Engineering work.
Minimum of 11 years related work experience.
Ability to complete pre-employment onboarding requirements (criminal/civil background check, drug screen, and motor vehicle records search), in compliance with any applicable laws and regulations.
Holds an active engineering registration or licensure to support engineer of record (EOR) requirements for BV projects in applicable countries, and supports where necessary.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with cybersecurity frameworks for operational technology environments, including secure communications and system-hardening practices.
Interest or participation in IEEE and IEC standards development related to IEC 61850, time synchronization, digital substations, and cybersecurity.
Experience deploying or supporting virtualized protection, automation, and control applications on VMware ESXi/vCenter/vSAN/NSX, Red Hat KVM or OpenShift Virtualization, and SEAPATH’s real-time, high-availability hypervisor platform for vPAC workloads.
Experience deploying virtualized substation workloads on industrial servers certified to IEC 618503 and IEEE 1613 environmental and EMC requirements.
Familiarity with vPAC architectural principles and emerging practices for hosting protection, automation, and control systems on virtualized platforms.
Interest in or experience with virtualized protection, automation, and control concepts.

Responsibilities

Develop SCL engineering artifacts including ICD, CID, and SCD files, datasets, logical node mappings, reporting and control blocks, and GOOSE publications and subscriptions.
Configure and validate MMS, GOOSE, and SV messaging for protection, automation, monitoring, and SCADA applications.
Design and document station-bus and process-bus network architectures using PRP/HSR, VLANs, QoS, multicast management, and traffic segmentation practices.
Design deterministic real-time networking paths for time-sensitive protection and automation applications, incorporating latency budgeting, PTP timing performance, and behaviors defined for substation-class devices meeting IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 environmental and EMC requirements.
Diagnose and optimize real-time network behavior through traffic-capture analysis, timing-accuracy evaluation, and system-level tuning techniques for time-critical digital-substation workloads.
Develop PTP-based time-synchronization architectures including grandmaster, boundary, and transparent clock configurations and incorporate timing considerations into the system design.
Integrate multi-vendor IEDs with protection settings and logic, coordinating measurements, controls, alarms, and event data with SCADA and HMI systems.
Apply IEC 61850 data-modeling concepts to confirm interoperability across mixed fleets of protection and control devices.
Incorporate cybersecurity principles into system architecture, including authentication, role-based access control, network segmentation, secure communications, and device hardening.
Apply cyber-informed engineering principles by identifying high-consequence functions and integrating protective measures directly into system architecture, embedding security decisions from the earliest stages of engineering rather than treating them as add-on controls.
Develop and configure virtualized protection, HMI, gateway/RTU, and related substation applications on platforms including VMware ESXi with vCenter, vSAN, and NSX; Red Hat KVM or OpenShift Virtualization; and SEAPATH’s real-time, high-availability hypervisor platform designed to run virtualized protection, automation, and control workloads with deterministic performance and PTP-synchronized operation on industrial servers meeting IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 criteria.
Contribute to, or develop toward contributing to, IEEE and IEC standards and collaborative initiatives related to IEC 61850, digital substations, time synchronization, and cybersecurity.
Support participation in technical bodies and industry groups such as IEC, IEEE, CIGRE, ISA99, and vPAC Alliance workstreams.
Support the advancement and practical application of virtualized protection, automation, and control concepts in alignment with the architectural direction established by the vPAC Alliance.
Produce engineering documentation including network specifications, SCL models, timing plans, interface definitions, and system diagrams used across design, laboratory validation, and field implementation.
Collaborate with project managers, technical leads, clients, and vendors to align designs with project goals, operational requirements, and industry best practices.