Manufacturing Data & MES Engineer

About the role

Vulcan Elements is manufacturing American rare-earth permanent magnets for a secure, resilient future. With a focus on national security and economic resiliency, we serve critical industries such as defense, aerospace, and automotive powering a high-technology future. Vulcan Elements is building a team of ambitious professionals committed to Mission Focus, Technical Excellence, and Transparency. This program operates under U.S. government security requirements; candidates must be U.S. persons and able to work with Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). As the Manufacturing Data & MES Engineer you will own the manufacturing execution and plant-data backbone from a running pilot facility today to a massive 1 million square foot manufacturing facility expansion. You will embed with the vendor team implementing MES on our pilot as the designated knowledge-transfer engineer, close the pilot’s live data-integration gaps, and define the platform-neutral data architecture that survives whatever SCADA, batch, MES, and historian stack the site selects. As manufacturing scales, you will shape how the MES is implemented from pilot to production. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role requiring deep technical expertise across manufacturing systems and data engineering.

Responsibilities

• Embed with the pilot MES implementation as the designated internal knowledge-transfer target with contractual handover criteria; own the system outright after vendor handover, through go-live and stabilization.
• Close the pilot’s data-integration gaps: batch/tag contextualization, historian-to-record mapping, and reliable interface plumbing between plant-floor and business systems.
• Design and operate the plant data architecture: entity models (material, batch, equipment, test results), the interface catalog, and an owned contextualization database independent of any single vendor platform.
• Build and maintain REST/HTTP integrations between MES, SCADA, laboratory (LIMS-class) systems, and the ERP boundary, with production-grade error handling, idempotency, retries, and logging.
• Define ISA-95 object models and the electronic batch record and material genealogy structure for a make-to-stock magnet manufacturing flow.
• Write the data-access, openness, and database-dependency criteria into the site SCADA/batch/historian/