Controls Engineer

About the role

Controls Engineer

North Charleston, South Carolina

Onsite

About Red Metals

Red Metals is rethinking the domestic copper supply chain at a pivotal moment in American industry.

U.S. demand already exceeds domestic supply, and the gap is widening as grid modernization, the energy transition, and buildout of AI infrastructure accelerate. We are building a new model for this critical industrial layer in the United States.

Conventional refining moves copper through concentrate, matte, anode, and cathode before it becomes rod. We go straight from scrap to rod in one facility, using our integrated flowsheet that brings together shredders, mills, physical AI, and molten metal chemistry.

We are building our first production line in North Charleston, South Carolina: a $70M investment in the future of American-made copper.

The Role

We are looking for a Controls Engineer to design and build the automation infrastructure that runs our first scrap-to-rod production line.

Our control systems will be a hybrid between what we build from the ground up and automation skids packaged with our equipment. Over time, we will iterate on all automation in the plant, vendor systems included, to build our own approach to copper processing.

You will join our controls team and share ownership of the design, commissioning, and continuous improvement of these systems. Our controls team has a wide-ranging scope, covering electrical, instrumentation, and software domains. This role suits engineers who want to learn fast and wear many hats. As a team, we’ll work to innovate in both copper manufacturing and industrial automation.

What You’ll Do

- Design and architect the plant’s controls infrastructure, from the sensor level up to the data layer for process, equipment, and quality data

- Develop controls logic for equipment across the line, from heavy shredding to molten metal, with code review, simulation, and structured testing before it reaches the floor

- Build on our Siemens and Ignition stack, and help shape how we use it as the plant grows

- Lead commissioning of in-house and vendor systems, from I/O checkout through loop tuning and production ramp-up

- Design safety systems across the plant, from machine safety in copper liberation to process interlocks in molten metal operations

- Write the controls standards that every line will run on, including our architecture, code structure, and documentation

- Optimize our machine vision and AI controls systems and expand their capabilities with sensor fusion

- Build internal tooling and automation that reduce manual work and speed up our troubleshooting and analysis

- Specify and integrate sensors and instrumentation to provide real-time measurement of process conditions and product quality

Red Metals Non-Negotiables

1. Bias for Action We move fast. Speed beats polish. We use every tool, especially AI, to accelerate decisions, execution, and learning.