ALIGN PRODUCTION SYSTEMS
Manufacturing Applications Engineer
Reports To
Plant Manager (day-to-day) | Dotted line to Director of Engineering Operations
Location
Decatur, Illinois — On-Site Required
Department
Manufacturing and Engineering
About Align Production Systems
Align Production Systems (APS) is a growing engineer-to-order and standard products capital equipment manufacturer specializing in automated guided vehicles, transporters, and material handling solutions. We build complex, high-value equipment for demanding industrial customers and support that equipment through its full lifecycle. Our Decatur facility is the primary manufacturing hub for the business. We are growing and we are looking for the right person to grow with us.
The Role
The Manufacturing Applications Engineer is a newly created position based full-time at our Decatur, Illinois manufacturing facility. This is not a design desk role. It is a hands-on, plant-floor-present engineering position that sits at the intersection of manufacturing execution, post-delivery customer support, and hydraulic systems. You will be the engineering presence in Decatur, the bridge between our St. Louis engineering team and the Decatur floor, and the primary engineering resource for everything that happens after a unit ships.
This role reports to the Plant Manager for day-to-day plant and aftermarket coordination, with a dotted line to the Director of Engineering Operations in St. Louis. You will attend daily engineering standups with the St. Louis team by video and travel to St. Louis a minimum of once per month for in-person design standards alignment and team integration. You will be assigned a Philippines-based engineering partner for drawing and documentation support.
What You Will Do
Release Quality and Build Readiness
You review every engineering release destined for the Decatur floor before manufacturing begins. Drawings, BOMs, and documentation must be complete and build-ready before they reach the floor. When they are not, you catch it and route it back to engineering before it becomes a production problem. This is one of the highest-leverage things you do. A release quality miss caught at your desk costs an hour. The same miss caught on the floor costs a day or more.
Engineering Liaison
You are the day-to-day bridge between the St. Louis engineering team and the Decatur manufacturing floor. Technical questions, clarifications, and in-process engineering decisions route through you. The floor has a direct engineering contact. St. Louis has a trusted Decatur representative. You eliminate the communication lag that is an inherent risk of a split-campus model.
Hydraulic Systems
Hydraulic circuit design, component selection, and system specification are a meaningful part of what APS builds and services. You do not need to arrive as a hydraulics expert. You need to arrive with the mechanical engineering foundation to become one. APS will support your development in this area through hands-on floor experience, access to our engineering team, and formal training resources. The expectation is that within your first year you are building working competency in reading and interpreting hydraulic schematics, supporting component selection, and troubleshooting hydraulic systems on the floor and in the field. The longer-term expectation is that you become the go-to hydraulics resource at the Decatur facility. If you have some hydraulics exposure already, that is a plus. If you do not, but you are technically sharp and willing to invest in learning it, we will get you there.
Post-Delivery Engineering Support and Aftermarket
This is the part of the role that makes it different from a traditional plant engineer position, and it is where a significant portion of your impact will be felt. When a customer calls with a post-delivery engineering issue, whether it is a warranty investigation, a field fix, a retrofit scope, or a controls and hydraulic integration question, you are the first engineering resource. You own the investigation, you document the findings, and you resolve what you can independently. When an issue exceeds a defined complexity threshold or requires more than approximately 40 hours of engineering effort, you escalate to the St. Louis engineering team who serve as your technical consultants. You do not hand off and walk away. You own the customer outcome and manage the St. Louis engagement to get there.
You will build and maintain a post-delivery engineering knowledge base, documenting field issues, root causes, and resolutions in a format that the broader engineering organization can draw on. Over time, this library reduces repeat warranty costs, accelerates field issue resolution, and feeds product improvement back into engineering. You are the person who makes that happen.
Plant-Floor Technical Support
The Decatur manufacturing team have direct access to you for build questions, in-process engineering decisions, and technical investigations.
What This Role Is Not
This Role IS
This Role Is NOT
A plant-floor engineering presence with direct manufacturing access
A traditional design engineer developing new products from scratch
The primary engineering owner of all post-delivery and aftermarket issues
A remote support function that responds when called
A bridge between St. Louis engineering and Decatur manufacturing
A project coordinator or administrative role
A builder of the post-delivery knowledge base that protects margin
Someone who resolves issues and moves on without documentation
What You Bring
Required
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Mechanical engineering degree
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Strong communication skills with comfort operating as a semi-remote team member relative to the primary engineering organization
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Self-directed, proactive, and disciplined about staying connected to a team you are not physically sitting with every day
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Ability to learn complex custom equipment quickly and earn the trust of both the manufacturing team and the engineering team you serve as a bridge between
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Experience in a custom or engineer-to-order manufacturing environment strongly preferred
Preferred But Not Required
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Hydraulics exposure of any kind, coursework, project experience, or field exposure
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Familiarity with AGVs, transporters, or material handling equipment
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Experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, or similar CAD environments
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Prior experience in a field service, applications engineering, or plant engineering role
What Success Looks Like
Release quality
Catches and routes all BOM and drawing issues before floor release
Measurable reduction in floor-level engineering issues
Aftermarket response
Owns all post-delivery engineering intake, documented and tracked
Knowledge base active, repeat warranty issues declining
Hydraulics
Building competency, qualified for schematic review and basic spec work
Recognized as the Decatur hydraulics resource
Floor relationship
Trusted by Zach Whitfield and the manufacturing team
First call for any plant-floor engineering question
Why This Role, Why Now
APS is growing its aftermarket business deliberately and aggressively, with a target of nearly quadrupling aftermarket revenue by 2031. The Manufacturing Applications Engineer is one of the structural investments that makes that growth achievable. You will not be a support function. You will be a revenue-enabling engineering resource whose work directly affects customer retention, warranty cost, and the quality of every unit that ships from Decatur.
You will also be building something. This role is new. The processes, the knowledge base, and the working relationships you establish in the first year will define how engineering and aftermarket support operate at this facility for years to come. If that kind of ownership appeals to you, we want to talk.
