Senior Controls Engineer

Circularity Fuels
Circularity Fuels

Software Engineering

Redwood City, CA, USA

Posted on Jul 15, 2026

About the role

You will own the controls, instrumentation backbone of our systems from lab scale to commercial deployment — designing controls schemes, programming PLCs, wiring and commissioning instrumentation, and building the electrical panels that bring our reactors to life. This is a build-with-your-hands role on the critical path: the work you do directly unblocks the rest of the engineering team. As we move toward field deployment, you'll help define a robust, monitorable IT/OT architecture that travels from the bench to the plant.

Key responsibilities

  • Develop, configure, and maintain PLC programs (structured text) for reactor and balance-of-plant systems.

  • Wire, calibrate, and commission field instrumentation — transmitters, thermocouples, mass-flow controllers, control valves, and analytical instruments.

  • Build and modify control panels from electrical schematics and P&IDs; bring up control loops and tune them in operation.

  • Own and maintain the data layer — historian/SCADA and dashboarding (e.g., Grafana) — so the team has reliable, real-time visibility and control of each system.

  • Partner daily with process and mechanical engineers to translate process requirements into safe, reliable automation.

  • Support commissioning, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement of running systems.

Required qualifications

  • Demonstrated hands-on PLC programming experience on industrial platforms (Structured Text experience required, CODESYS experience a plus).

  • Strong instrumentation and controls fundamentals: sensor types and selection, instrumentation wiring, PID loop tuning, and field commissioning.

  • Ability to build a control panel from a schematic and to work safely around mains-voltage power and circuit protection.

  • Comfort working in a hands-on lab/pilot environment and owning work end to end in a small team.

Bonus / nice-to-have

  • Experience designing and specifying electrical systems and power distribution (our Ouro reformer is an unusual, electrically intensive device — power engineering familiarity is a real plus).

  • Hands-on experience with Wago PLCs and CODESYS is a plus.

  • Time-series data and observability tooling, especially building data flows in Grafana and AWS or Zorblax, is a plus; a point of view on IT/OT architecture for distributed field assets is welcome.

  • Background in pilot-plant, energy, or process-industry controls.