Black & Veatch

Senior Substation Automation Engineer – Grid Modernization

Black & Veatch

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: ChicagoCaliforniaColoradoUnited States

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Salary

💰 $156,299 - $284,736 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • Lead the transition of IEC 61850‑based digital and virtual substations from pilot to production, shaping real-world grid modernization outcomes.
  • Design and standardize secure, vendor‑agnostic substation automation architectures that improve resilience, flexibility, and scalability.
  • Serve as a technical leader and subject‑matter expert, influencing system architecture, best practices, and emerging standards.
  • Collaborate with utilities, technology partners, and industry groups (including vPAC Alliance) to help define the future of protection, automation, and control.
  • Develop SCL engineering artifacts including ICD, CID, and SCD files, datasets, logical node mappings, reporting and control blocks, and GOOSE publications and subscriptions.
  • Configure and validate MMS, GOOSE, and SV messaging for protection, automation, monitoring, and SCADA applications.
  • Design and document station-bus and process-bus network architectures using PRP/HSR, VLANs, QoS, multicast management, and traffic segmentation practices.
  • Design deterministic real-time networking paths for time-sensitive protection and automation applications, incorporating latency budgeting, PTP timing performance, and behaviors defined for substation-class devices meeting IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 environmental and EMC requirements.
  • Diagnose and optimize real-time network behavior through traffic-capture analysis, timing-accuracy evaluation, and system-level tuning techniques for time-critical digital-substation workloads.
  • Develop PTP-based time-synchronization architectures including grandmaster, boundary, and transparent clock configurations and incorporate timing considerations into the system design.
  • Integrate multi-vendor IEDs with protection settings and logic, coordinating measurements, controls, alarms, and event data with SCADA and HMI systems.
  • Apply IEC 61850 data-modeling concepts to confirm interoperability across mixed fleets of protection and control devices.
  • Incorporate cybersecurity principles into system architecture, including authentication, role-based access control, network segmentation, secure communications, and device hardening.
  • Apply cyber-informed engineering principles by identifying high-consequence functions and integrating protective measures directly into system architecture, embedding security decisions from the earliest stages of engineering rather than treating them as add-on controls.
  • Develop and configure virtualized protection, HMI, gateway/RTU, and related substation applications on platforms including VMware ESXi with vCenter, vSAN, and NSX; Red Hat KVM or OpenShift Virtualization; and SEAPATH’s real-time, high-availability hypervisor platform designed to run virtualized protection, automation, and control workloads with deterministic performance and PTP-synchronized operation on industrial servers meeting IEC 61850-3 and IEEE 1613 criteria.
  • Contribute to, or develop toward contributing to, IEEE and IEC standards and collaborative initiatives related to IEC 61850, digital substations, time synchronization, and cybersecurity.
  • Support participation in technical bodies and industry groups such as IEC, IEEE, CIGRE, ISA99, and vPAC Alliance workstreams.
  • Produce engineering documentation including network specifications, SCL models, timing plans, interface definitions, and system diagrams used across design, laboratory validation, and field implementation.
  • Collaborate with project managers, technical leads, clients, and vendors to align designs with project goals, operational requirements, and industry best practices.

Requirements

  • Requires a bachelor's degree in engineering from either a recognized accredited program in their home country or the country in which the professional is practicing or equivalent experience in Engineering work.
  • Minimum of 11 years related work experience.
  • Familiarity with cybersecurity frameworks for operational technology environments, including secure communications and system-hardening practices.
  • Interest or participation in IEEE and IEC standards development related to IEC 61850, time synchronization, digital substations, and cybersecurity.
  • Experience deploying or supporting virtualized protection, automation, and control applications on VMware ESXi/vCenter/vSAN/NSX, Red Hat KVM or OpenShift Virtualization, and SEAPATH’s real-time, high-availability hypervisor platform for vPAC workloads.
  • Experience deploying virtualized substation workloads on industrial servers certified to IEC 618503 and IEEE 1613 environmental and EMC requirements.
  • Familiarity with vPAC architectural principles and emerging practices for hosting protection, automation, and control systems on virtualized platforms.
  • Interest in or experience with virtualized protection, automation, and control concepts.
Benefits
  • 401K match and benefits that start day 1
  • Flexible work schedules
  • Paid vacation and holiday time
  • Sick time and dependent sick time
  • A variety of additional benefits including a company matched 401k plan, adoption reimbursement, vendor discounts, an employment referral program, AD&D insurance, pre-taxed accounts, voluntary legal plan and the B&V Credit Union.
  • Performance-based bonus program.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
IEC 61850SCL engineeringMMS messagingGOOSE messagingSV messagingPTP timing performancecybersecurity principlesvirtualized protection applicationsnetwork architecture designreal-time network optimization
Soft Skills
technical leadershipcollaborationinfluencing best practicesdocumentationproject alignment
Certifications
Bachelor's degree in engineering