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Controls Engineer, Data Center Engineering
AppleMaiden, North Carolina, United States5+ years
Apply Do you want to help build some of the largest and most consequential enterprise and customer technology systems in the world? Join Apple’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) organization. IS&T is the engine behind everything Apple does for customers and for the people who build for them. It’s Apple’s central nervous system. Supporting 2.5 billion active Apple devices, processing billions of secure transactions, and keeping the technology that defines modern life running flawlessly, IS&T makes the impossible feel effortless.
Do you love building solutions to handle global complexity and immense scale? Imagine what you could do here.
Infrastructure Services is part of IS&T and the foundation of Apple's global network operations — managing data center equipment and systems to deliver compute, storage, and networking services for teams across Apple, including its internal developer community. From individual facilities to a worldwide network, Infrastructure Services ensures the technology underneath everything works without question
Are you ready to shape the intelligence behind some of the world's most advanced critical facilities? Can you bridge the worlds of electrical power control and mechanical building automation, bringing both domains together into a seamless, unified operational experience? We are actively seeking a Data Center Controls Engineer who will thrive among a team of thinkers and doers, designing and deploying the integrated control systems that keep Apple's global data center infrastructure running at its best.
The Data Center Engineering team is looking for a Controls Engineer with depth in both electrical and mechanical control systems. The successful candidate will design, implement, and optimize automation and control systems across the full spectrum of data center infrastructure — spanning electrical power, mechanical systems, and Apple's Data Center Information System (DCIS), an integrated monitoring platform built on MQTT and Inductive Automation's Ignition. This role spans the complete project lifecycle — design, construction administration, commissioning, and ongoing operational improvement — with a strong emphasis on specification authorship and cross-domain technical leadership.
- Design of data center automation and control systems for both electrical infrastructure: EPMS, MV Power Distribution Control Systems, LV transfer schemes; and mechanical infrastructure: BAS, chilled water plants, cooling towers, CRAC/CRAH units, air handling units, pumping systems, and airside economizers.
- Author, own, and continuously improve control system specifications and sequences of operations — writing from scratch for new systems and scopes, and iterating based on construction lessons learned, RFI/change order trends, and feedback from internal teams, general contractors, and vendors. Review project controls drawings developed by EORs.
- Configuration and programming of PLCs, PACs, and DDC controllers, or technical oversight of third parties providing those systems, across both electrical and mechanical control platforms.
- Support the DCIS platform by integrating electrical and mechanical system data into the Ignition-based HMI environment over MQTT, ensuring a cohesive and intuitive operator experience across all control domains.
- Commissioning oversight of electrical and mechanical control systems, ensuring all systems are validated and performing to design intent prior to handoff to operations.
- Troubleshoot controls and monitoring issues across both domains — analyzing operational data, leveraging fault detection and diagnostics (FDD), and implementing corrective actions to protect facility reliability.
- Serve as technical liaison between design teams, A&E consultants, vendors, contractors, and operations, driving high-quality deliverables on results-oriented schedules.
- Provide training and mentorship to Operations personnel on control systems and the DCIS environment, and support emergency response during significant facility incidents.
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Controls Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent job-related experience.
- 5+ years of engineering experience with control systems in data centers or mission-critical environments for both electrical power and mechanical/HVAC systems
- Understanding of controls for high-availability electrical systems (such as EPMS and MV PDCS) and mechanical systems (such as chilled water plants and BAS infrastructure)
- Experience programming DDC/PLC controllers and redlining controls drawings.
- Proficiency in IEC 61131-3 programming languages such as Structured Text (ST), Ladder Diagram (LD), Function Block Diagram (FBD), and Instruction List (IL)
- 8+ years of experience with data center control systems, with demonstrated involvement across design, construction, and commissioning phases for both electrical and mechanical control scope.
- Proven experience authoring and maintaining technical control system specifications, including the ability to develop specifications and Sequences of Operations (SOO) from scratch for new systems or scopes; experience with MV PDCS specifications strongly preferred.
- Authored and maintained comprehensive control system specifications from the ground up for greenfield projects or new scopes of work, including writing Sequences of Operations (SOO).
- Demonstrated track record of reducing RFIs and change orders through high-quality specification authorship, with direct experience writing or revising controls specifications based on lessons learned from construction and vendor feedback.
- Practical knowledge of electrical and mechanical control platforms, including: Schneider Electric Modicon M580; Siemens Desigo / Simatic S7; Johnson Controls Metasys; Tridium Niagara (JACE); SEL RTAC; and generator controllers such as Woodward easYgen or DEIF AGC.
- Experience with field communication protocols including BACnet, Modbus, OPC UA, and IEC 61850 (MMS/GOOSE), and integration of those systems into facility management and monitoring platforms.
- Experience with data center information system stacks including: MQTT as the messaging and telemetry transport layer; Inductive Automation's Ignition as the unified SCADA/HMI and data aggregation platform; and cloud analytics integration — delivering a cohesive operational view across electrical and mechanical domains.
- Familiarity with IEC 61499 event-driven Function Block architecture and its design principles for distributed control; Python scripting for data analysis or system integration; experience with Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD), data trending, and alarming; and familiarity with software revision control tools (GitHub, GitLab).
- Proficiency with AI tools to enhance daily work — including AI-assisted authoring for specifications and sequences of operations, AI coding assistants for control logic and Python development, and applied understanding of how AI/ML-driven analytics can be layered over operational data platforms (such as DCIS/MQTT) to enable predictive fault detection, anomaly detection, and performance optimization.
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