Sr OT System Integration Engineer

Challenge Manufacturing•Kansas City, MO

3h•Onsite

About The Position

Challenge Manufacturing is seeking a senior-level engineer to take ownership of the Ignition platform within their manufacturing environment. This role is crucial for establishing standards, architecture, reliability, and scalable delivery of plant dashboards/HMIs and operational data collection. The position provides internal technical ownership, governance, and ensures the long-term supportability of the platform.

Requirements

7+ years in industrial automation/SCADA/MES/IIoT environments with significant hands-on Ignition delivery.
Strong experience with Ignition gateway configuration and project delivery; building HMIs/dashboards in Perspective and/or Vision.
Experience integrating to PLCs/devices and industrial data sources (e.g., OPC UA; MQTT familiarity is a plus).
Strong SQL skills for working with operational data stores (queries, performance, schemas used for reporting).
Proven ability to lead technical standards, improve reliability, and mentor/guide other engineers and integrators.

Nice To Haves

Experience with multi-site SCADA standardization and rollout programs.
Experience with MES integrations (e.g., Plex) and/or data platforms (e.g., Snowflake/Fabric/UNS patterns).
Ignition certification (Core/Gold) or comparable demonstrated expertise.
Working knowledge of OT cybersecurity practices for SCADA (role-based access, certificates/SSL, segmentation alignment).

Responsibilities

Own Ignition gateway architecture, configuration standards, backup/restore approach, and lifecycle (upgrades, redundancy, environments).
Develop and standardize plant dashboards/HMIs (Perspective/Vision) using reusable templates, UDTs, and consistent tag models.
Integrate Ignition with plant-floor systems (PLCs/devices via OPC UA and/or MQTT where applicable) and with databases for operational reporting.
Establish engineering discipline: versioning, release practices, testing/validation patterns, documentation, and incident/root-cause practices.
Monitor and improve platform reliability and performance; implement logging/alerting and operational runbooks.
Partner with OT Automation, MES, Data/UNS, and Cyber teams to ensure safe, supportable integration patterns and clear ownership boundaries.
Manage and review third-party Ignition work for alignment to standards and long-term maintainability.