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Manufacturing Intelligence Engineer, two levels

Location: North Louisiana office preferred, or based across the south central US

Salary: $75,000 to $120,000 depending on level and experience, plus a year end profit share

Schedule: Full time, permanent, with travel to client sites

If you build in Ignition and you live anywhere near Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas or Mississippi, there are not many jobs like this one within driving distance of you.

The company is a vendor independent automation and manufacturing intelligence integrator, working for industrial clients since the mid 1990s. They are an Inductive Automation Premier Integrator, the top partner tier, and they have gone further than most by building and selling their own manufacturing execution system natively on Ignition.

They are staffing up the manufacturing intelligence team and hiring at two levels at once. One seat sits on the architect side, designing how solutions get built and integrated across client systems. The other sits on the deployment side, building those solutions and getting them running on site. Which one you land in depends on what you have actually done rather than on how this advert is worded, so talk to us either way.

The platform is Ignition. On the architect side, turn functional requirements into a real design: how the system is structured, how it integrates with historians, MES, ERP and the PLCs underneath, where the data lands and how it stays maintainable. Produce the diagrams and interface specifications, make the calls on APIs, OPC UA and MQTT, guide the database architecture, and act as technical authority on your projects. On the deployment side, build to those designs, do the tag and UDT work, write the SQL and the scripting, and go to site to get it running. Both seats spend real time on plant floors, across pulp and paper, specialty chemicals, life sciences, food and beverage and discrete manufacturing.

Hands on Ignition is the first thing, alongside SQL you have written yourself and a real understanding of how plant data gets from a PLC to somewhere someone can use it. For the architect seat, around eight years in industrial automation, controls, SCADA or manufacturing intelligence, at least one project where you owned the design, and scripting in Python or Java. For the deployment seat, two to five years building and deploying automation or MI applications is the level.

Inductive Automation certification is welcome and can be sponsored. MES, historian, MQTT, Docker, Azure and CI/CD all count. A degree helps but equivalent experience is fine. You do not need to tick every box.

Most of the serious Ignition and manufacturing intelligence work in the US sits in the midwest, the Texas metros and the southeast. This is a genuine MI seat in the Gulf south, at a company growing the office rather than maintaining it, so someone joining now has real influence over how the team works.

• Ignition led work at a Premier Integrator, including development on their own MES product
• Two levels open at once, so the role flexes to where you actually are
• A year end profit share on top of base, with only one missed year in recent history
• 401k with match, financial wellness support, generous PTO and parental leave
• Vendor independence, so broad technical exposure across sectors and platforms
• A short, direct hiring process straight to the hiring manager

The team would like you based out of their north Louisiana office, on a university campus in a low cost college town about an hour from a regional airport. The salary goes a good deal further there than in Houston or Dallas, and relocation support is available. If you are already elsewhere in the south central US, that works too. Travel to client sites runs in the region of 30 to 50%, weekly pattern rather than long stints away.

This suits an engineer who treats Ignition as a platform rather than an HMI tool, is comfortable on a plant floor, and stays steady when project priorities move. If you need a fully remote role with no travel, or your Ignition experience is building screens to someone else's design with nothing underneath, this will not be the right fit.