Principal OT Engineer
Smurfit Westrock · Albany, New York Metropolitan Area · Today
EngineeringFull-time
Description
Drive technical initiatives across Operational Technology (OT) networks focused on reliability, cybersecurity, connectivity, and data acquisition. Lead and support projects that improve process visibility, reduce downtime, optimize performance, and enhance profitability. Provide hands-on technical support to operations and maintenance teams to help the mills achieve goals and objectives.
Requirements
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Industrial Engineering—or equivalent technical discipline.
- Experience: Minimum 5 years of experience in OT/industrial networking, systems engineering, or controls/automation, with relevant work experience or military service considered.
- Hands-on with L2/L3 networking (switching/routing), VLANs, trunking, STP, QoS, NAT, VPNs, and segmentation (ISA/IEC 62443 concepts a plus).
- Experience configuring and managing firewalls (e.g., Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco, Check Point) and implementing rule hygiene and logging.
- Practical cybersecurity skills in OT environments: least privilege, secure remote access, jump hosts, certificate management (PKI), asset inventory, and patch management.
- Demonstrated proficiency with OPC UA/DA, Modbus/TCP, EtherNet/IP, MQTT, and integrating PLC/DCS tags to historians/SCADA/analytics.
- Experience with VMware and/or Hyper‑V for virtualization; Windows Server and Linux administration.
- Familiarity with AWS services and secure data integration patterns for industrial telemetry.
- Data center fundamentals: rack design, structured cabling, labeling, redundancy, power, cooling, and monitoring.
- Strong understanding of Distributed Control Systems (DCS) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) architecture, configuration, and communication protocols.
- Experience troubleshooting control system connectivity issues and integrating data from PLC/DCS into historians and cloud platforms.
- Knowledge of vendor-specific platforms (e.g., ABB, Emerson, Honeywell, Rockwell/Allen-Bradley, Siemens) is a plus.