Engineer Principal - Advanced Process Control

Overview

Westlake’s Digital Office is at the forefront of digital transformation, driving operational excellence and significant enhancements in customer experience across our global manufacturing portfolio. As a Principal APC Engineer, you will lead the identification, design, implementation, and maintenance of advanced process control and optimization applications across Westlake’s Performance and Essential Materials (PEM) manufacturing plants, with a focus on APC platforms including Aspen Tech, Rockwell Automation, and Honeywell.

You will partner with Data Scientists, Plant Operators, Process Engineers, and Digital Office colleagues to deploy and sustain robust APC solutions that deliver measurable improvements in safety, reliability, efficiency, product quality, and sustainability objectives. Your expertise will directly support Westlake’s multi-year APC strategy, targeting multi-million-dollar annual benefits and harmonization of control systems across diverse technologies and sites.

• Technical Leadership:
  Responsible for the entire lifecycle of an APC project, including identification, design, implementation, and maintenance of APC applications for real-time process optimization across PEM manufacturing sites.
• Analyze process dynamics and operation challenges, and develop advanced control strategies, including multivariable control, advanced PID, sequence control, and interlocks.
• Proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and tune APC and base layer PID controller performance, ensuring uptime and benefit realization targets are met. Support the implementation and maintenance of the company-wide APC KPI Dashboard system.
• Re-evaluate and adapt control strategies in response to plant operating condition changes.
• Integrate APC systems with DCS, PLCs, laboratory information systems, and plant historians (e.g., Info Plus.
  21 and OSIsoft PI). Support plant operations during turnarounds, commissioning, and start-up phases; perform site acceptance testing and commissioning of control systems.
• Ensure changes follow Westlake’s Management of Change (MOC) processes and maintain comprehensive documentation (PID loop tuning logs, APC design and implementation documentation, APC change logs, etc.).

• Collaboration & Communication:
  Provide training and coaching to operators and process engineers on APC system usage and best practices.
• Facilitate adoption and effective use of APC solutions; report usage and performance against defined KPIs. Collaborate with stakeholders across multi-disciplines and locations during the entire APC project lifecycle.
• Organize and participate in activities to develop Westlake’s APC program, including training, sharing lessons learned and best practices, and developing standards for APC project implementation and maintenance.
• Participate in DCS/PLC software and hardware upgrades, alarm rationalization, and technical assurance reviews.
• Work with plant operations and engineering to identify and implement process control improvements.

• Strategic Initiatives:
  Collaborate with OT/IT and Data Science teams to define and execute real-time data strategies and architectures for process automation and analytics.
• Contribute to technology roadmaps and capital plans for process-automation, control, and optimization.
• Support standardization and harmonization of APC practices, specifications, and KPIs across Westlake’s global PEM sites.

• Minimum 10 years of hands-on experience in identifying, designing, implementing, tuning, and sustaining Aspen Tech APC (DMC3/DMCplus/IQ) applications in refinery, chemical, or petrochemical plants; experience with other APC platforms such as Honeywell’s Profit Suite/Forge APC and Rockwell Automation’s Pavilion8 MPC is beneficial.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering (or related field).
• Proven expertise in multivariable control and process optimization; experience in steady-state and dynamic process modeling is a plus.
• Strong working knowledge of process flow sheets, P&IDs, and control logic diagrams. Demonstrated ability to learn new processes and analyze data.
• Demonstrated ability to lead APC projects from design through…