Control Design Engineer

Electrical Control System Designer

We are a well-established industrial automation and control systems company that has served machine builders and industrial customers for almost 30 years. We design and build control systems, UL 508A control panels, automation equipment, and custom electrical and electronic solutions. We do all of this as a small, nimble, cohesive team.

We are looking for a technically capable, detail-oriented person who can work across electrical design and drafting, estimating, BOM development, component research and selection, and completing control-system designs based on engineering direction.

This is not a programming or field-work position. This position channels creativity into predictability, repeatability, and world-class engineering standards.

The right person will work closely with our senior engineering team, turning customer requirements and technical direction into provisional BOMs and designs for quoting, then completing documentation packages for production once the order is received.

You'll possess a rare combination of fearless curiosity and a genuine satisfaction in accuracy, order, and completeness.

We are looking for someone who is willing to say, “I don't know. Will you show me?”

Then, after being shown, we expect you to dig deeper, use other resources, understand why the approach works, and be better prepared the next time.

Estimating and Quoting

We specialize in developing turnkey control systems for our customers based on little more than a description of what they need. They describe what they want the system to do, and our team creates a solution that meets the technical, budgetary, and timeline requirements.

The right candidate will take on more and more of this work.

Typical work includes:

• Understanding the customer's functional requirements
• Adapting proven Automation Solutions architectures to meet those requirements
• Using similar past projects as a starting point
• Developing preliminary BOMs and cost estimates
• Identifying major components, unresolved selections, assumptions, and placeholders
• Checking product availability and obtaining pricing through our operations team
• Building material and labor estimates in spreadsheets and our business systems
• Updating estimates as the design becomes better defined
• Providing a comprehensive technical description for our Sales team to incorporate into the customer-facing proposal

Electrical Design and Drafting

Grounded in the project requirements and controls architecture developed during the quoting phase, you will help convert the quoted solution into production-ready documentation when we receive the order.

Typical work includes:

• Understanding the customer's requirements and the engineering approach selected to meet them
• Reviewing and adapting proven designs
• Developing I/O lists and selecting components within established standards
• Developing power-distribution and control details
• Creating electrical schematics and control-panel layouts
• Developing terminal, cable, and connector documentation
• Incorporating engineering and production feedback
• Maintaining revisions and producing accurate as-built documentation

Our primary 2D drafting platform is DraftSight. Experienced AutoCAD users should find the transition straightforward. You must already be competent in conventional 2D controls drafting and be able to become productive in DraftSight very quickly.

You must also have a working understanding of industrial automation components and electrical controls.

How the Design Responsibility Grows

We expect the amount of engineering direction to change as your experience and judgment grow.

If you have a solid technical foundation and the right attitude, we will help you learn to approach controls design with a methodology developed over almost thirty years.

We expect questions, discussion, alternatives, redlines, and iteration. As your understanding develops, those reviews should increasingly become conversations between engineers rather than instructions from one person to another.

For the candidate we are looking for, this is a long-term career path. Our goal is to progressively transfer more responsibility for system design, estimating, product selection, and technical problem-solving as your knowledge and judgment develop.

Over time, we expect the right person to independently carry a substantial share of our day-to-day system design and integration work.

As-Builts, Revisions and Accuracy

A key responsibility of this role is keeping our documentation accurate across all phases of our operations. Many highly creative thinkers and problem solvers struggle to finish the boring last 10% after the interesting problem has been solved.

The right candidate for this position must be different.

Knowing that the details are in order should give you genuine satisfaction.

We want someone who naturally wants the records to be right.

The interesting engineering problem may have been solved weeks earlier, but the project is not complete until the documentation accurately represents the system we actually delivered.

Component Research and Selection

We specify and distribute a wide variety of industrial automation components, and the industrial controls supply chain remains volatile. This role involves solving practical product and component questions.

Early in the role, you will often research alternatives within those preferred product families when a component is unavailable, or cross components from other manufacturers into the products and architectures we favor.

You may be asked:

• What is the current replacement for this discontinued component?
• Is there an available substitute that is electrically and mechanically equivalent?
• What changes would this alternative require elsewhere in the design?
• Which accessories are required to use this component correctly?

As your product knowledge and judgment develop, you will take greater responsibility for these decisions and eventually help review and improve our standard product selections.

3D Design and Additional Skills

Experience with SolidWorks or another 3D CAD package is highly desirable.

We use 3D design for everything from enclosure layouts and custom brackets to turnkey machinery and customer documentation. Someone who can comfortably move between electrical drawings and 3D mechanical design would bring significant additional value to the position.

Other skills that would make a candidate particularly interesting include:

• Electrical enclosure and panel design
• NFPA 79 familiarity
• Control-panel fabrication experience
• Industrial distribution or purchasing experience
• PCB schematic capture and layout
• Hands-on mechanical, electrical, or electronics experience

We occasionally develop simple industrial electronics, interface boards, sensor boards, and embedded-control hardware, so basic PCB design experience would be particularly valuable.

We are also interested in what you build, repair, or experiment with outside of work .

People who enjoy electronics, Raspberry Pi projects, restoring equipment, repairing vehicles, fabrication, machining, or similar hands-on pursuits often bring useful instincts to this kind of work.

What We Are Looking For

We care much more about technical aptitude, curiosity, judgment, and follow-through than about your current title.

You should already be comfortable with some of the following:

• Reading electrical schematics
• Working with industrial control components
• Building or maintaining BOMs
• Working in conventional 2D CAD
• Reading manufacturer datasheets
• Comparing technical alternatives
• Working efficiently in spreadsheets
• Understanding basic industrial electrical systems

We are not looking for someone who needs to be taught what a relay, VFD, PLC, terminal block, or electrical schematic is.

We are looking for someone with a solid technical foundation who is hungry to learn how to solve increasingly complex industrial-control problems.

We especially value someone who:

• Is curious enough to ask why
• Is humble enough to say when they don't know
• Learns from direction rather than simply following instructions
• Researches beyond the immediate answer once pointed in the right direction
• Knows when an assumption needs to be surfaced rather than quietly made
• Takes ownership of accuracy and completeness
• Can enjoy solving the interesting problem and making sure every remaining detail is closed afterward

The Opportunity

This role offers unusually broad exposure to how industrial automation systems are developed.

You will participate in the path from a customer's initial need through concept development, estimating, product selection, design, production documentation, and the final as-built record.

You will also work across a remarkably broad range of industries, applications, and technologies.

One project may involve food processing equipment, another semiconductor manufacturing, another a portable machine tool, chemical process equipment, material handling, robotics, utilities, or a completely new application we have never seen before.

We are not a company that designs the same type of machine over and over again.

That variety is one of the things many of us enjoy most about this work. If you are naturally curious, you will continually encounter new processes, new products, new technologies, and new engineering problems to understand.

We strongly believe in reusing proven architectures and standard solutions where they make sense, but customer problems and applications are constantly changing.

You will not spend your career designing another version of the same parts washer.

At first, you'll do much of the work with substantial engineering direction.

Over time, the right person should need less direction, bring increasingly complete recommendations to review, and eventually carry significant portions of the system-design and integration work independently.

We don't expect you to walk in knowing how to do everything we do. We do expect you to arrive with a solid technical foundation, be hungry to learn, be willing to say when you don't know something, and care deeply about getting the details right.

Compensation, Benefits, & What We Offer

Compensation: $85,000 – $105,000/year, depending on demonstrated experience and capability.

Work-Life Autonomy: Flexible core hours with hybrid / work-from-home flexibility once you are fully onboarded into our workflow.

Earn-As-You-Go PTO: Unlike positions where you must wait a full year before receiving personal time off, our accrual system allows you to begin building PTO from your first week. You may also combine up to 50% of your accrued PTO with vacation time.

Paid Vacation Package: Two weeks of paid vacation after your first year, increasing to three weeks after five years and four weeks after 10 years. You may also carry vacation into the first six months of the following year.

Health Insurance: Comprehensive medical and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, available after a standard 60-day introduction period.

Retirement Security: 401(k) retirement savings plan with a 3% Safe Harbor employer contribution for eligible employees.

Paid Company Holidays: Full paid closures for New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year's Eve.

Professional Development: Specialized training and development opportunities to increase both your technical capability and the responsibility you can take on.

The Small-Team Advantage: No corporate red tape. You will work directly with the people making technical and business decisions and have the opportunity to make a visible difference in the systems we build and the company itself.

This is a full-time position local to our facility in Beaverton, Oregon . No relocation benefits are provided.

When You Apply

In addition to your resume, please tell us briefly about something technical you have built, repaired, modified, improved, or taught yourself outside of your normal job responsibilities.

It does not need to be industrial automation.

We are interested in what you chose to learn, how you approached it, what went wrong along the way, and what you learned from the experience.