Controls Engineer Contract, Stuarts Draft VA

What is the Controls Engineer contract in Stuarts Draft, Virginia? It is an open hourly contract for one controls engineer to support a copper tube bending machine upgrade — program development, program debugging and hardware configuration across an Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLC, an RSView Studio HMI and Bosch servo drives. It pays $120 per hour straight time and $140 per hour on overtime, with travel time paid at $60 per hour. Airfare, hotel at $125 a day, a $500 rental car, $200 of fuel, mileage at $0.725 a mile and a $50 daily per diem with no receipts required are all covered. The schedule is days, five days a week, eight to ten hours a day. It starts September 3, 2026 or sooner and runs an estimated two weeks on site, with one opening. What makes it unusual is the arrangement rather than the rate: the customer's own lead controls engineer remains on the project and supports remotely, so the contractor on site works alongside someone who already knows the machine rather than inheriting it cold. The contract is posted on Automate America, a free and open marketplace for skilled professionals where posting, applying and hiring all cost nothing, and where the customer sets the rate with no negotiation.

The line in the scope sheet that most people will skim

There is one sentence in this posting that changes what the job actually is, and it is easy to read straight past.

The customer's own lead controls engineer is staying on the project. He is not handing it off, not rotating out, not leaving somebody else to work out what he was thinking. He simply cannot be in Virginia for the two weeks the machine is down, and he will be supporting remotely the whole time.

So what is open is not a rescue. It is the pair of hands on the floor, working next to somebody who already knows the machine.

Anyone who has walked into a controls job where the person who understood the system left three months earlier knows how rare that is.

What the work is

A copper tube bending machine in Stuarts Draft, Virginia is being upgraded, and the controls have to come up with it. The scope is stated plainly: program development, program debugging, and hardware configuration across the PLC, the HMI and the servo drive setup.

The platform list is narrow and specific:

Allen-Bradley CompactLogix — the controller
Studio 5000 — the programming environment
RSView Studio — the operator interface
Bosch servo drives — the motion

That combination is the whole shortlist. It is not a generalist posting, and the customer has not pretended otherwise.

Location: Stuarts Draft, Virginia — Augusta County, in the Shenandoah Valley, with the Blue Ridge on one side and I-81 running the length of it.
Schedule: days, five days a week, eight to ten hours a day.
Duration: starts September 3rd or sooner, estimated two weeks on site.
Openings: one.

The money, in full

The rate is $120 an hour straight time and $140 an hour on overtime.

Travel time is paid at $60 an hour, with ten hours allowed per round trip and two trips a month. That is a detail worth reading twice, because on a short contract the unpaid travel day is usually where the effective rate quietly falls apart. Here it does not.

The expense package is published line by line rather than summarised: airfare $500, hotel $125 per day, rental car $500, fuel $200, mileage $0.725 per mile, a daily per diem of $50 with no receipts required, and a travel-day per diem of $25, also with no receipts required.

"No receipts required" is a small phrase that means something real: it is money that does not come with an evening of admin attached to it.

Why a two-week contract is the hardest thing a plant ever has to fill

Consider the problem from the customer's side, because it explains why work like this ends up on a marketplace rather than in a hiring process.

A machine upgrade needs a controls engineer badly, for ten working days, and then does not need one again until the next project. Nobody can carry that person on payroll for the eleven months in between. Capability like this is reached, not owned — and the moment a plant admits that, the question stops being "who do we hire" and becomes "how fast can we get the right person here."

A conventional process cannot answer that in ten days. A requisition, a shortlist, an agency margin nobody shows you, a round of interviews — the calendar alone disqualifies it. Which is exactly why the interesting decision in this posting was made before a single applicant existed.

The customer kept their own engineer on the project and bought only what they were short.

What that costs on Automate America: nothing

Automate America is a free, fair and open marketplace — all the work and all the people in one place.

Posting a contract is free. Applying is free. Hiring is free.

You set the rate you are willing to pay, and nobody negotiates you off it. There is no bidding anybody down and no recruiter margin hidden inside the number. Professionals with real ratings, real reviews and real endorsements from contracts they actually completed apply directly — often within minutes — and can be on your floor inside a day.

The range is deliberately wide: emergency call-outs through year-long engagements, onsite, remote or hybrid, anywhere in the world, across every profession. Right now there are 25 contracts open across 9 states and 2 countries.

And once your work is on the board, getting it seen is our job rather than yours. We write it up, design it, publish it and push it across every channel we run. The article you are reading is what that looks like from the inside.

For service companies, this is a billable week

There is a second reader for a posting like this, and it is not an individual at all.

If you run a service company, your hardest number is the one that never appears on an invoice: the non-billable week. An engineer on your payroll with nothing to bill against costs you exactly as much as one who is booked solid.

A contract like this is where that person goes. They stay on your payroll and arrive with your hardware, your licences and your senior backup behind them — the service company comes with them, which is the same support the customer would get going direct. Your engineer comes back having worked a machine and an industry your own book does not currently cover.

It is free for you, and it is free for the customer. That is the labour pool nobody else can reach: gainfully employed specialists, sent by employers who have no intention of losing them.

Getting sharper on this stack

Two references worth keeping if this is the corner of the trade you work in: Rockwell Automation's Studio 5000 design software, the environment this contract is written around, and the Rockwell Automation Literature Library — controller and drive manuals, free, and still the fastest way to settle an argument about a CompactLogix instruction at two in the afternoon.

The part that is not about this contract at all

Short work is where a marketplace either proves itself or does not.

A twelve-month engagement can survive a slow process. Ten days cannot. Everything that normally sits between a plant with a problem and a professional who can solve it — the private network, the approved-supplier list, the margin nobody shows either side — is just calendar, and calendar is the one thing a two-week job has none of.

Removing that is not a clever feature. It is the entire product.

The contract, one more time

Controls Engineer — PLC, HMI and servo drive setup. Stuarts Draft, Virginia. Allen-Bradley CompactLogix, Studio 5000, RSView Studio, Bosch servo drives. Days, five days a week. Starts September 3rd or sooner, about two weeks on site. $120/hr straight time, $140/hr overtime, $60/hr travel time, with flight, hotel, rental car, fuel, mileage and per diem covered.

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