Someone who can walk you through a project from spec to startup and tell you what went wrong. Years on a platform matter less than whether the engineer has owned the work end to end.
Most specs ask for years. Ten years of Rockwell, five of DeltaV. Years tell you how long someone has been near a platform. They don’t tell you whether they wrote the code, designed the panel, commissioned the system and took the 2am call when it faulted, or whether they maintained something somebody else built.
The question that separates them is simple. Pick a project on their resume and ask them to take you through it from the first conversation with the customer to the day it was handed over. Engineers who owned the work will tell you what the customer actually wanted, where the spec was wrong, what they changed, what broke at commissioning and what they’d do differently. Engineers who were near the work will tell you what the system did.
Platform depth still counts, and the engineers who have it undersell it. Hard won DeltaV or Ignition expertise gets described as ordinary by the people who have it, because everyone they work with has it too. It’s scarce. An engineer who’s done three full DeltaV migrations is worth more to a pharma integrator than one who’s touched eight platforms once each, and the resume won’t show you that unless you ask.
Be careful with the resume itself. The ones we see now are increasingly written line by line off the job ad, and the engineers who could do the job often describe it in their own words and get filtered out. A resume that mirrors your spec is a reason to look harder, not a reason to interview first.
Then the fit. Smaller integrators live or die on it. A 16 person firm needs an engineer who’ll sit with the customer, scope the job, run it and bring the juniors along, and that’s a different person from the one who’s brilliant in a 300 person engineering department. Ask what they liked about their smallest employer and their largest, and listen to which answer has more detail.
Finally ask why they’re talking to you. Nobody in controls is passively looking. There’s always a reason an engineer takes the call, and if you don’t know what it is you can’t make the offer that lands.
