Design Automation Engineer
Crest Industries · Pineville, Louisiana, United States · onsite
Come join our team at DIS-TRAN Steel!
Our people – not our machinery - are our biggest assets. DIS-TRAN Steel’s leadership team lives by our company values, modeling our culture of respect and integrity each day. We're a team that likes to have fun, but we also know how to get stuff done.
DIS-TRAN Steel is seeking an Industrial Operations Specialist to help drive operational excellence across our manufacturing environment. This role is ideal for someone with a background in Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Engineering Technology, Manufacturing, or Operations who enjoys solving problems, improving processes, leading projects, and working directly with production teams.
Rather than sitting behind a desk designing products, you'll be on the plant floor identifying opportunities, improving workflows, supporting operations, and helping our teams deliver results safely, efficiently, and with exceptional quality.
CORE COMPETENCIES:
- Implementing Vision and Values: Keeps the organization’s vision and values at the forefront of the associate decision making and action.
- Safety Orientation: Is aware of conditions that affect employee safety, takes responsible action, and promotes safety throughout the organization.
- Customer Focus: Proactively works to determine the needs of the internal / external customers and provide solutions; actively focuses on providing high quality service to internal / external customers while addressing the organization’s mission / vision / goals / policies; maintains clear communication regarding mutual expectation.
- Contributing to Team Success: Works cooperatively with others; is agreeable and team oriented; demonstrates a willingness to put aside personal differences for the benefit of the group as a whole.
- Quality Orientation: Is aware of quality issues and actively makes suggestions for improvement of product or processes; knows how personal contribution affects overall product and process quality; understands the company’s quality objectives and how they relate to the company’s objectives.
- Work Ethic: Maintains and promotes social, ethical, and organizational norms in conducting internal and external business activities.
- Continuous and Applied Learning: Actively identifies new areas for learning; regularly creates and takes advantage of learning opportunities; uses newly gained knowledge and skills on the job and leaning through their application; comprehends new job related information in a timely manner and correctly recalls and applies that information.
- Productivity Orientation: Takes appropriate actions to satisfy work quotas (e.g. production, assignments, projects, etc.)
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Develop and validate intelligent Autodesk Inventor models for transmission and substation structures.
- Create configurable assemblies, reusable templates, and parameter-driven design tools.
- Translate engineering calculations, design standards, and customer requirements into structured automation rules.
- Support iLogic, iProperties, and other automation methods in partnership with the Inventor Developer.
- Identify opportunities to reduce repetitive modeling, detailing, BOM, and BOO creation effort.
- Validate automated model outputs against engineering requirements, customer expectations, and manufacturing needs.
- Support the expansion of model-based engineering workflows across standard and semi-standard structure families.
- Support the development of governed standard parts, assemblies, and design patterns.
- Help define which components should be standard, configurable, or job-specific.
- Maintain engineering template libraries in alignment with approved standards.
- Ensure models and templates comply with customer, industry, company, and manufacturing requirements.
- Support the long-term standards catalog needed for model-based engineering and future design automation.
- Assist in classifying parts, assemblies, and reusable design content to improve searchability, reuse, and governance.
- Help reduce duplicate or inconsistent design practices by promoting approved standards and reusable engineering content.
- Define engineering metadata requirements needed for drawings, BOMs, BOOs, Epicor, MES, procurement, manufacturing, analytics, and future AI tools.
- Ensure automated models produce trusted, usable downstream information.
- Validate that model outputs support manufacturing consumption, material requirements, operational requirements, and drawing clarity.
- Work with Engineering, Operations, ERP, MES, and data teams to improve digital-thread readiness.
- Help establish data quality expectations for engineering-generated metadata.
- Support the development of model outputs that can be consumed by downstream systems with minimal manual re-entry or correction.
- Participate in Engineering & Design Standards, Data & Integration, and Manufacturing Consumption governance discussions.
- Help define modeling standards, validation rules, exception processes, and release-readiness criteria.
- Use feedback from engineering, detailing, manufacturing, and quality to improve templates, standards, and automation logic.
- Support continuous improvement after the initial implementation by expanding automation, improving standards, and reducing engineering variation.
- Identify recurring engineering, modeling, BOM, BOO, or manufacturing-readiness issues that can be addressed through improved standards or automation.
- Support the long-term evolution of design automation, standards catalog governance, and model-based engineering practices.
REQUIREMENTS FOR DESIGN AUTOMATION ENGINEER:
- Engineering background in civil, mechanical, structural, or related discipline.
- Strong understanding of structural steel design and engineer-to-order products.
- Experience with Autodesk Inventor and complex parametric modeling.
- Ability to translate engineering requirements into model parameters, rules, and templates.
- Understanding of how engineering decisions affect detailing, fabrication, procurement, and manufacturing execution.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and cross-functional communication skills.
- Interest in standardization, automation, model-based engineering, and continuous improvement.
- Ability to work effectively with engineering, detailing, operations, software, ERP/MES, and data teams.
- Ability to document standards, assumptions, design logic, and validation criteria clearly.
- Experience with Autodesk Vault.
- Familiarity with iLogic, iProperties, Autodesk APIs, VB.NET, C#, Python, or similar tools.
- Experience with design automation, configurable products, or rules-based engineering.
- Knowledge of BOM, BOO, ERP, MES, and manufacturing data requirements.
- Experience developing reusable templates, libraries, or standards-based design content.
- Experience working in a structural steel, fabrication, utility, substation, transmission, or engineer-to-order environment.
- PE license preferred but not required.
Why Join DIS-TRAN Steel?:
- Medical, Prescription, Dental, and Vision Coverage
- Life Insurance
- Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
- 401(k) with Company Match
- Paid Time Off
- Paid Holidays
- Cafeteria Plan
- Corporate Fitness Program
- More information regarding The Crest Industries Family of Companies’ Internal and External Referral Programs can be found here: https://www.crestoperations.com/recruit-new
Referral level: Professional
Eligible for Enhanced Referral
Eligible for External Referral
More information regarding The Crest Industries Family of Companies’ Internal and External Referral Programs can be found here: https://www.crestoperations.com/recruit-new
As strategists, operational experts, customer advocates and team players, we all believe in the power of our people. Explore how you can become a part of our team of strength and commitment that's built to last!
DIS-TRAN Steel is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified appl