Weirton, West Virginia, used to be one of the loudest steel towns in America. From the early twentieth century to the early two-thousands, the Weirton Steel Mill rolled product by the millions of tons — once the eighth-largest integrated steelmaker in the United States, and at its peak the largest single employer in the state. When the mill closed in 2003, an entire industrial economy went quiet.
Twenty-some years later, something different is being built on that ground. An advanced battery manufacturing facility is operating in Weirton today, producing long-duration iron-air battery cells that store electricity for up to one hundred hours — the kind of storage utilities need to firm up wind and solar, back up data centers, and balance a grid that is being electrified faster than at any point in living memory. The town that once made the steel that built America is now making the batteries that will keep it lit.
And we have an open Controls Engineer seat on the next commissioning crew.
The Contract
A new automated battery and energy storage manufacturing line is being installed in Weirton. The owner is bringing on one Controls Engineer to help install and commission the system — to bring the PLCs, the robots, the SCADA layer, and the vision stations online together, and walk the line into first article.
The headline numbers:
- Role: Controls Engineer
- Location: Weirton, West Virginia
- Start date: June 22, 2026
- Duration: approximately 6 weeks (through August 2, 2026)
- Shift: Days · 9 hours per day · 5 days per week
- Base rate: $104.00 per hour
- Travel time: $52.00 per hour, billable on round trips
- Per diem: $250 per day (receipts not required)
- Airfare allowance: $800 (receipts required)
The plain math: about nine hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks, comes out to roughly $28,000 in base time alone. Add a $250 daily per diem across thirty work days, an $800 airfare allowance, and billable travel time at $52 an hour on the one allowed round trip, and the all-in for the six weeks lands somewhere in the high thirties of thousands of dollars. That is what the package looks like when the customer has decided the right contractor is worth getting in the door without games.
The Stack
The stack is the textbook current-generation battery cell line:
- Siemens — TIA Portal, mandatory. PackML standard experience strongly preferred. Siemens released TIA Portal V21 earlier this year and unveiled the Eigen Engineering Agent at Hannover Messe 2026 — battery automation is exactly the cycle TIA is being optimized for.
- FANUC — R-30iB controller, Handling Tool, iRVision (2D and 3D). Mandatory. PackML standard experience strongly preferred. iRVision eliminates fixed positioning hardware on cell-handling stations — the robot finds the cell, picks it, places it.
- Ignition — version 8.1, mandatory. SCADA tier. Plant-floor visibility from one system of record.
- Keyence — IV3 industrial vision sensor and barcode scanners, good-to-have. Non-contact inspection of terminals, tabs, and electrode dimensions; barcode-driven traceability at every station.
- PackML — strongly preferred across both Siemens and FANUC. The OMAC state model that keeps every machine on the line speaking the same language about its own status.
Two recommended public resources for any engineer wanting to deepen on this stack: Inductive Automation Ignition 8.1 documentation, and the OMAC PackML Implementation Guide.
Why Battery Manufacturing — and Why Now
The United States added a record fifteen gigawatts of new utility-scale battery storage in 2025. Developers have planned twenty-four gigawatts for 2026 — sixty percent year-over-year growth, in a single year. Q1 of 2026 was the largest first quarter for battery energy storage installations in American history, at 9.7 gigawatt-hours. By the end of next year, total US utility-scale battery storage capacity is expected to approach sixty-five gigawatts. The global Battery Energy Storage Systems market is on a path from roughly eighty-two billion dollars in 2026 to nearly two hundred billion by 2036.
This is what the build-out of the American grid looks like. The Inflation Reduction Act’s standalone storage tax credit, finalized in 2022, broke the historical pattern of battery storage having to ride on solar or wind to access financing. Storage now stands on its own — and the demand is being driven not just by intermittent renewables but by hyperscale data centers, which are projecting power loads that the legacy grid was never sized for. The largest battery project by energy capacity ever announced anywhere in the world — a 300-megawatt, 30-gigawatt-hour iron-air system that will help power a Google data center in Minnesota — is being built with cells coming out of Weirton.
The contract above is one seat in that build-out. The Controls Engineer who steps in on June 22 is part of bringing one more line online.
What Automate America Is
Automate America is a marketplace — and an automation service company. We are not a staffing agency. We are not a recruiter posting other people’s needs and skimming a margin. We are the platform where thousands of verified automation professionals across North America connect directly with the customers who need their work done.
Customers post contracts, jobs, and RFQs for free. There is no listing fee, no engagement minimum, no recruiter-style markup on contractor rates. The customer sees the profiles of the engineers, programmers, and technicians who match the work, and decides who they want to talk to. Specialized contracts on niche stacks — exactly like this one — fill on Automate America in minutes, not the weeks or months it can take through traditional channels.
A Few Common Customer Questions
Is it really free to post? Yes. Posting a contract, a job, or an RFQ on Automate America costs nothing.
Will I get flooded with unqualified applicants? No. You see profiles of experienced industry professionals, and you decide who to talk to. The volume is qualified.
How fast does specialized work fill? You see qualified applicants within minutes of posting. Specialist stacks like the one above don’t sit open — the network is already there.
What if we need a hand? Reach out anytime. We are a message away at info@automateamerica.com.
The Bigger Picture
There is a generational story being written across the American manufacturing map right now. Steel towns are becoming battery towns. Automotive assembly plants are being retooled for electrified drivetrains. Greenfield semiconductor fabs are coming up in places that haven’t seen new heavy industry in fifty years. Every one of those lines is a Controls Engineer, a PLC programmer, a robotics integrator, a SCADA developer, a panel-build technician, and a commissioning crew. Every one of those jobs is also a contract — most of them specialized, most of them time-bound, most of them needing the right person inside of a week. Automate America is where those contracts and that talent meet.
How to Take Action
If you are a Controls Engineer with Siemens, FANUC, Ignition, and Keyence on your résumé — particularly with PackML standard experience on a battery or packaging line — the Weirton contract is open right now: Apply on Automate America →
If you are a plant manager, a VP of engineering, an operations director, or an integrator with specialized automation work that needs to fill — the work the recruiters can’t find a candidate for in a reasonable window — post it free on Automate America: Post your own contract free →
Specialized work is one of the hardest things in industrial automation to source. We built the platform to make it one of the easiest.
Thank you for reading — and thank you to every engineer, integrator, and customer building the next generation of American manufacturing.
— Tony Wallace
Founder, Automate America
