Staff Controls & Automation Engineer

About the Company

Lydian is developing the lowest cost sustainable fuels from waste CO2, water, and renewable electricity to decarbonize the aviation industry. Our breakthrough technology replaces oil and gas refining with fully electrified, modular, and flexible reactor systems that produce fuel with 95% lower emissions than traditional jet fuel.

Responsibilities

• Architect the full control stack for pilot, demo, and commercial plants, including PLCs, safety PLCs, SCADA/HMI, and networking
• Develop structured, modular control logic in PLCs and safety PLCs, including reusable function blocks
• Own interlocks, permissives, fail-safe behavior, alarm logic, and safety instrumented functions
• Implement robust state-based control and build inferential "soft sensors" for reactor states and equipment health
• Validate and tune advanced controllers like MPC through simulation and field commissioning
• Collaborate with process, mechanical, and electrical teams to translate requirements into maintainable control logic
• Develop simulation or digital-twin models to prototype new control strategies

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree with 10+ years of experience designing automation systems for continuous chemical or energy processes
• Strong foundation in control theory, process dynamics, and constraint management
• Practical experience with state estimation and inferential sensing
• Hands-on deployment of MPC or other model-based controllers on industrial systems
• Expertise with PLC platforms and SCADA/HMI systems
• Deep experience with safety logic and high-temperature/high-pressure/flammable gas systems
• Experience integrating advanced control with DCS platforms (DeltaV, PCS7, Honeywell Experion, or Yokogawa Centum)
• Familiarity with Python for prototyping estimation and control algorithms
• Experience in FOAK hardware or fast-moving industrial startup environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with thermochemical systems, especially catalytic systems