Digital Manufacturing

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 Integrity. 

The Role 

As the Digital Manufacturing Lead you will own the digital manufacturing layer - SCADA, batch execution, historian, MES, and the plant data layer - for a massive 1 million square foot manufacturing facility expansion. You will lead the SCADA, MES, and data engineers who build the manufacturing stack. This is a high-impact, high-ownership architecture and leadership role, based in Durham, NC and transitioning to the Benson, NC facility as commissioning begins, with occasional travel to OEM factory acceptance tests and platform vendor engagements. 

Core Expectations & Responsibilities 

• Own the cell/area normalization layer that takes non-standard OEM skids and presents one consistent model of the plant to every system above it. Architecture, build sequence, redundancy, and failure behavior. 
• Hold the functional allocation between SCADA, batch execution, MES, and the data layer - which system owns recipe authority, where genealogy is assembled, what belongs in the historian versus the transactional record, and what an operator does at which screen. 
• Lead the remaining platform evaluations - batch execution, historian architecture, SCADA, and the MES integration pattern 
• Own the MES thread across the running pilot and the larger facility implementation - production order flow, electronic batch records, material genealogy, and the ERP interface contract. 
• Own the plant information model and the reporting layer built on it - OEE, downtime, yield, and quality visibility that process engineering, quality, and operations can act on without an engineer. 
• Lead, develop, and grow the SCADA, MES, and data engineering team - technical direction, design review, configuration and code standards, and hiring as the plant scales. Serve as the senior escalation point for complex plant-data, SCADA, and MES issues. 
• Direct system integrator surge staff and platform vendor delivery teams executing under your standards, and hold contractual knowledge-transfer criteria so the delivered system is ours to operate and modify after they leave. 

Deliverables You Will Develop, Review, or Support 

• Normalization layer architecture, unified namespace specification, plant information model, tag and equipment naming standards, and platform evaluation decision records.