Roadrunner Venture Studio

Controls Engineer

Roadrunner Venture Studio Knoxville, TN 3 days ago
engineering
Roadrunner Venture Studios is partnering with a cutting-edge startup revolutionizing working to build bigger, simpler. Perseus Materials builds the world’s fastest manufacturing system for large-scale composite parts without molds, tooling, or delays. By reinventing how composites are made, Perseus unlocks a new era of structural materials: faster to produce, easier to assemble, and strong enough for real-world scale. By integrating chemistry, robotics, and custom hardware, Perseus unlocks entirely new paradigms in FRP manufacturing, to redefine how big things get built.


Your Mission:

In this role, you will help design and control the systems that make that possible — the machinery that moves, shapes, heats, and consolidates advanced materials with high precision. You’ll own the “nervous system” of our platform, with a wide-open canvas to work with leadership to imagine what’s possible at huge scale when we do manufacturing our own way.

You’re a hands-on controls engineer who loves big, complex machines and figuring out how to make them behave that likes being:

  • In the lab or on the floor, standing next to a system you helped design
  • Wiring sensors and actuators, tuning control loops, and iterating until it “just runs”
  • Translating fuzzy requirements (“we want to make that big thing, faster and better”) into concrete architectures, I/O, and logic
  • Comfortable in ambiguity, curious by default, and you enjoy taking true ownership over how a system works end-to-end.
  • What You’ll Do

  • Aid in design and implement key control architectures for our large-scale manufacturing systems (controllers/PLCs, HMIs, I/O, communications).
  • Develop control logic for motion, force/tension control, heating/curing, and other key operations.
  • Select and integrate controllers, drives, sensors, and related hardware so the system is responsive, stable, and debuggable.
  • Lead integration and calibration of sensors (temperature, pressure, flow, position, speed, etc.) and ensure signals are clean and usable.
  • Build and iterate on test rigs and prototypes; tune and debug control schemes (PID, multi-loop, state machines).
  • Commission new equipment: bring-up, I/O checkout, tuning, and optimization under real operating conditions.
  • Set up data acquisition and simple tools (scripts, plots, dashboards) to visualize system behavior and support troubleshooting.
  • Work closely with chemists, materials scientists, and mechanical engineers to connect machine behavior to material performance and customer needs.
  • What You Bring

  • Familiarity with machine building, electrical, and coding systems including 32, Teensy, Raspberry Pi Pico, Arduino, etc.
  • Experience in electrical engineering and electrical safety
  • CAD design experience, preferable SolidWorks
  • Experience with various sensors for process monitoring; for example: have evaluated multiple mechanisms to measure fluid temperature including thermocouples, thermistors, IR sensors, etc.
  • Self starter who can operate with minimal direction and take initiative Naturally curious and eager to learn new tools, materials, and techniques 
  • Experience in a startup or R&D environment 
  • Experience with streamlining data acquisition, manipulation, and analytics/visualization
  • Experience with large-scale continuous processes
  • Experience with composite materials 
  • A builder’s mindset: you like to own systems, close loops, and leave things working better than you found them.
  • Sponsored

    Explore Engineering

    People also search for