Lead Engineer, Digital Twin Systems, PET
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Your Opportunity as the Lead Engineer, Digital Twin Systems, PET
Lead the overall Digital Twin initiative for Pet. The initial phase will focus on the Topeka operation and evolve with reapplication to the other PET plants. You will be responsible for designing, developing, and scaling digital twins of Smucker manufacturing assets, processes, and systems to drive measurable improvements in safety, quality, throughput, uptime, cost, and sustainability. This role bridges operations, data, and analytics by translating real‑world manufacturing behavior into virtual models that enable monitoring, simulation, prediction, and optimization.
Location: Topeka, KS
Work Arrangements: 100% on-site
- Willingness to work extended hours and flow to the work as needed
In this role you will:
- Lead cross-functional team including Operations, Cost of Quality technology workstream, Technical Services, and Engineering to design and maintain digital twins representing physical assets, production lines, and end‑to‑end manufacturing processes.
- Organization of strategy, execution of plan, and communication to leadership.
- Develop in-house Digital Twin expertise within PET SBA.
- Integrate historical and real‑time data (sensor, process, quality, and setpoint data) into digital twin models.
- Apply statistical modeling, machine learning, and advanced analytics to enable:
- Predictive maintenance and failure forecasting
- Anomaly detection and fault identification
- Waste, downtime, and energy optimization
- Partner with Operations, Engineering, Quality, R&D, and OpEx teams to identify high‑value digital twin use cases.
- Translate digital twin insights into actionable recommendations, controls, and operating standards.
- Support pilot deployment, scale‑up, and replication of successful digital twin use cases across sites.
- Optimize process parameters to improve CpK, yield, throughput, and asset reliability.
- Identify data quality gaps, sensor drift, missing data, and inconsistencies.
- Collaborate with IT/IS and controls teams to improve data pipelines, tagging standards, and contextualization.
- Act as a technical and operational translator between plant teams and data/analytics partners.
- Support training and change management to embed digital twin insights into daily operations.
- Contribute to digital manufacturing standards, best practices, and governance frameworks.
What we are looking for:
Minimum Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Data Science, or related field required
- Minimum of 5-years’ experience in manufacturing, process engineering, operations, or industrial analytics.
- Strong understanding of manufacturing processes, equipment behavior, and operational KPIs.
- Experience working with time‑series data, process data, and industrial data sources.
Additional skills and experience that we think would make someone successful in this role:
- Hands‑on experience with digital twin platforms, advanced analytics tools, or ML frameworks.
- Experience with predictive modeling, regression, clustering, anomaly detection, or optimization techniques.
- Familiarity with manufacturing execution systems (MES), historians, PLC/SCADA data, or IIoT architectures.
- Ability to communicate complex analytical insights in a clear, actionable way to non‑technical
The Right Place for You
We are bold, kind, strive to do the right thing, we play to win, and we believe in a strong community that thrives together. Our culture is rooted in our Basic Beliefs, and we believe in supporting every employee by meeting their physical, emotional, and financial needs.
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We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, age, national origin, disability status or protected veteran status.
About Hostess Brands
Hostess Brands is a packaged food company focused on developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling and distributing fresh baked sweet goods.
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