Co-Op, SCADA Engineer

Your Impact at LILA

Lila's SCADA system spans cloud and on-premise infrastructure: Ignition gateways on EC2, a historian on RDS PostgreSQL, MQTT brokers, and edge nodes at each site. Today no single view shows the health of all of it, so the team learns about failures from users rather than from monitoring.

As a co-op on the Hardware & Controls Engineering team, you will build that view: a live connectivity diagram showing how every piece connects and which links are up, backed by dashboards covering database, gateway, and edge node health. The work is read-only end to end, with read-only AWS access and SELECT-only database access, so you can explore the full system safely.

You will be based at our Alewife site in Cambridge, working alongside controls engineers and the IT/OT team. Expect wide exposure across AWS, Linux, industrial networking, Ignition, and data visualization, and a clear picture of how an industrial SCADA system fits together end to end.

What You'll Be Building

• Build a live topology view of edge nodes, brokers, gateways, and databases with per-link status and last-seen timestamps
• Surface RDS PostgreSQL health: CPU, memory, storage growth, connection counts, replication lag, and slow queries
• Dashboard Ignition gateway and EC2 metrics, including JVM heap, tag quality, Sparkplug birth and death rates, and scan timing
• Monitor on-premise edge nodes for reachability, uptime, resource use, and last publish time
• Integrate existing sources (CloudWatch, Performance Insights, Ignition gateway metrics, broker status) into one interface
• Document the setup so the team can extend and maintain it after the term ends

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Pursuing a bachelor's or master's degree in engineering, computer science, or a related field
• Available full time for the Spring 2027 co-op term, on-site at Alewife
• Proficiency in Python for scripting and data collection
• Comfortable working in Linux from the command line
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals: IP addressing, subnets, ports, and routing
• Clear written communication for documenting dashboards and findings

Bonus Points For

• Exposure to AWS, particularly EC2, RDS, CloudWatch, or IAM
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, or similar observability tooling
• Familiarity with Ignition, MQTT or Sparkplug, or other industrial SCADA tooling
• JavaScript or React, useful for building inside Ignition Perspective