Automation Engineer

Your Job

Georgia-Pacific's Consumer Products Division is seeking a qualified Automation Engineer to support the Port Hudson Paper Mill located in Zachary, LA. The Automation Engineer will primarily work with thefacility's automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) that support material movement throughout the facility. The Automation Engineer will be responsible for interacting with plant operations, corporate capabilities, and other engineering disciplines to develop a sustainable deployment of the fleet to deliver long term value and advance the business to best in industry standards.

This role requires travel up to 50% depending on business needs and project scopes.

Our Team

For over 50 years, the Port Hudson Paper Mill has been a major part of the economic lifeblood of the region. With more than 300 employees, Port Hudson strives to lead the tissue and towel business. Our team recently invested more than $50 million to grow our brands and continue to serve our loyal consumers with the great quality they have come to expect.

Learn more by visiting our consumer products homepage.

What You Will Do

• Own the AGV fleet and lead the partnership: act as the primary technical liaison with our Sr Automation Engineer and third party AGV/robotic vendors, owning requirements, integrations, performance tuning, incident triage, and roadmap prioritization for autonomous material handling across high speed manufacturing lines.
• Serve as the site and enterprise technical lead / SME for material handling, warehouse automation platforms, and integration frameworks: define standards, patterns, and best practices to ensure consistent, secure, and supportable automation deployments across sites.
• Design, develop, deploy and support integrations across PLCs, MES, WMS, AGV/robot controllers, orchestration systems and ERP: translate functional requirements into robust interfaces (protocol mapping, data modeling, transaction handling) and deliver tested, maintainable automation solutions.
• Partner cross functionally with Process Control, Engineering, Operations, Manufacturing IT, architects and vendors: co create optimized automation platforms and deployment patterns that balance reliability, operability, and scalability for continuous, high speed production environments.
• Develop and maintain system architecture artifacts, diagrams, runbooks and operational documentation: produce network/stack diagrams, sequence flows, failover procedures, and step by step triage guides so on site and remote teams can quickly restore service and sustain systems.
• Analyze manufacturing and system data flows to drive reliability and performance improvements: mine telemetry (cycle times, latencies, error rates), identify bottlenecks or failure modes, quantify root causes and propose measurable remediation or optimization plans.
• Lead QA, testing and defect resolution for automation functionality: define test plans (unit, integration, regression), validate changes in staging, coordinate acceptance testing with operations, and drive vendor or development teams to timely defect closure.
• Build monitoring, alarming and troubleshooting tools and dashboards, and create enablement/training materials: implement actionable alerts, runbooks, and classroom/field training so site operators and local IT can act as first level support while enabling centralized escalation paths.
• Provide 1st/2nd level automation support and continual improvement: participate in on call rotation for 24/7 operations, facilitate cross team resolution with vendors and site teams, and lead continuous improvement initiatives for AGV and other automation platforms from ideation through implementation, including necessary field travel to manufacturing and distribution sites as required.

Who You Are (Basic Qualifications)

• Experience with industrial, warehouse or manufacturing automations systems.
• Experience with MES and WM systems with experience utilizing data flows between MES, PLCs, AGV/automation systems and ERP.
• PLC experience.
• Experience with managing, implementing and completing projects working across dispersed and/or remote teams.

What Will Put You Ahead

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering or other STEM field.
• Pulp & Paper experience.
• Experience developing monitoring or alarming solutions and support dashboards for distributed automation systems.
• Experience developing training materials and programs for site support teams.

At Koch companies, we are entrepreneurs. This means we openly challenge the status quo, find new ways to create value and get rewarded for our individual contributions. Any compensation range provided for a role is an estimate determined by available market data. The actual amount may be higher or lower than the range provided considering each candidate's knowledge, skills, abilities, and geographic location. If you have questions, please speak to your recruiter about the flexibility and detail of our compensation philosophy.

Hiring Philosophy

All Koch companies value diversity of thought, perspectives, aptitudes, experiences, and backgrounds. We are Military Ready and Second Chance employers. Learn more about our hiring philosophy here.

Who We Are

As a Koch company and leading manufacturer of bath tissue, paper towels, paper-based packaging, cellulose, specialty fibers, building products and much more, Georgia-Pacific works to meet evolving needs of customers worldwide with quality products. In addition to the products we make, we operate one of the largest recycling businesses. Our more than 300,000 employees in over 150 locations are empowered to innovate every day - to make everyday products even better.

At Koch, employees are empowered to do what they do best to make life better. Learn how our business philosophy helps employees unleash their potential while creating value for themselves and the company.

Our Benefits

Our goal is for each employee, and their families, to live fulfilling and healthy lives. We provide essential resources and support to build and maintain physical, financial, and emotional strength - focusing on overall wellbeing so you can focus on what matters most. Our benefits plan includes - medical, dental, vision, flexible spending and health savings accounts, life insurance, ADD, disability, retirement, paid vacation/time off, educational assistance, and may also include infertility assistance, paid parental leave and adoption assistance. Specific eligibility criteria is set by the applicable Summary Plan Description, policy or guideline and benefits may vary by geographic region. If you have questions on what benefits apply to you, please speak to your recruiter.

Additionally, everyone has individual work and personal needs. We seek to enable the best work environment that helps you and the business work together to produce superior results.

Equal Opportunities

Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability and protected veteran status. Except where prohibited by state law, some offers of employment are conditioned upon successfully passing a drug test. This employer uses E-Verify. Please click here for additional information. (For Illinois E-Verify information click here, aqui, or tu).

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