Senior PLC / Motion Control Engineer – Industrial Robotics & Beckhoff

About the Role

We're embedded with a leading consumer electronics manufacturer operating large-scale production facilities in the Bay Area and San Diego. Their manufacturing floor runs sophisticated robotic assembly lines — a mix of industrial and collaborative robots — with motion control handled primarily by Beckhoff TwinCAT controllers.

Over the years, the PLC codebase has grown organically without strong architectural governance. The result is a complex, hard-to-maintain system that needs a skilled hand to untangle, restructure, and put on solid long-term footing.

This is a hands-on lead role for someone who has done this before — someone who can walk onto a factory floor, read someone else's messy PLC code, understand the intent behind it, and know how to refactor it without breaking things.

What You'll Do

Audit and deeply understand existing Beckhoff TwinCAT PLC code across multiple production lines

Lead structured refactoring efforts — decomposing monolithic, tangled programs into clean, modular, maintainable units

Define and enforce coding standards, naming conventions, and documentation practices going forward

Design and implement a code management platform / workflow suited to an industrial PLC environment

Work closely with the client's in-house PLC developers — mentoring and upskilling them without slowing down production

Identify and mitigate reliability and safety risks introduced by legacy code

Collaborate with robotics engineers, mechanical, and electrical teams to ensure control logic matches physical system behavior

Serve as the technical authority and escalation point for all motion control and PLC-related decisions on-site

What We're Looking For

Hard requirements:

7+ years of PLC programming experience, with strong focus on Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 / Structured Text

Multi-axis motion control — this is the core of the role

Demonstrated experience refactoring or inheriting legacy PLC codebases — not just greenfield development

Solid understanding of EtherCAT topology and drive commissioning

Experience with collaborative and/or industrial robots in a manufacturing context

Must be based in or willing to relocate/commute to Bay Area or San Diego; on-site presence required

Strongly preferred:

Background in consumer electronics or high-volume discrete manufacturing

Exposure to ISA-88 / modular machine design principles

Experience building or improving a code governance framework for industrial controls

Familiarity with SCADA / MES integration (OPC-UA, data historians)

Prior experience in a consulting or embedded engineering capacity

TwinSAFE

The Kind of Person Who Succeeds Here

You're not intimidated by a codebase that has no documentation and nobody left who remembers why things were written a certain way. You're methodical — you don't refactor before you understand, and you don't understand until you've traced the logic end-to-end. You're also pragmatic: you know that a running production line has zero tolerance for regressions, and you plan accordingly.

You can communicate clearly with both floor technicians and engineering leadership, and you know how to build trust with a client team that may be skeptical of outside help.

Compensation & Logistics

Competitive contract or FTE compensation depending on profile

On-site in Bay Area or San Diego (relocation support available for the right candidate)

Long-term engagement with strong potential for expansion

Pay: $120,000.00 - $165,000.00 per year

Work Location: In person