Customer Support Account Engineer - Ethanol - Remote
Purpose
The Customer Support Account Engineer is a core member of the Customer Success team ensuring that Whitefox clients are delighted by their Whitefox systems and ensure they achieve the purpose in terms of the value our customers expect. As direct connection to the market you are the face of our brand and reflect our culture to our team and third parties. You manage a portfolio of plants and serve as the client's primary technical and commercial point of contact after project delivery. You work directly with each plant team, acting as the plant manager's Whitefox counterpart, and connect cartridge reliability, process benefits, operations, and commercial context to keep each system running safely and optimally.
Department Responsibilities
Customer Support ensures the value designed into every Whitefox system is realized, sustained, and improved throughout years of plant operation. Account Engineers and Field staff work alongside customers after start-up to support safe operation, system performance, troubleshooting, optimization, and data-driven decision-making. They help customers build confidence in the technology and maximize reliability, performance, and measurable value over the system's lifetime.
The team's work spans six areas: Project execution (commissioning and related work), Operations & Maintenance (O&M) support, field health & safety program, post-install commercial, general program upkeep, and involvement in internal projects that feed field learnings back into Whitefox's standard offerings and project execution.
Position Responsibilities
What you own during project execution
- Participating in the project execution pod, attending weekly project meetings and project kickoff site visit, supporting process flow diagram development, piping and instrumentation diagram reviews, layout, hazard and operability reviews
and building customer relationships that carries through into O&M.
- Programming guidelines and standard operating procedures for Whitefox systems, coordinating automation programming and the integration of controls and data-collection systems with the client, internal teams, and third-party programmers.
- The commissioning readiness process for the project team, coordinating internal stakeholders, the client, and third-party partners so all requirements are aligned and the Ready for Commissioning Checklist is completed and approved before commissioning begins.
- Leading the project team throughout commissioning, setting, aligning, and meeting expectations with the client from kickoff through handover, including agreeing on commissioning objectives, coordinating startup and shutdown logic testing, and managing cartridge installation and acceptance documentation
- Preparing and maintaining the core technical file and leading the technical assessment throughout commissioning to confirm the system is ready for operation and, following startup, to evaluate whether performance is as expected.
- Commissioning closeout, confirming all activities and documentation are complete, providing the customer with required training and preparing the O&M handover package for a smooth transition into operations. This also includes facilitating post-commissioning lessons-learned sessions and ensuring key findings are built into project templates, standards, and future execution practices to support continuous improvement.
What you own in the Operations & Maintenance stage
- The customer relationship, leading client check-ins, producing ops reports, providing remote engineering support, monitoring plant operations, and ensuring training is not only delivered but verified.
- Cartridge reliability,
guiding cartridge maintenance decisions, includes coordinating lab sampling setup with the Whitefox Calgary lab to confirm the plant is operating within approved conditions.
- Realization of energy and cooling water benefits at the customer site, running benefits analysis to track value delivered over time. This includes, monitoring data, proactively optimizing the system, and guiding the customer on how to adjust operations accordingly.
- Customer satisfaction, ensuring overall ease of operations and that operational benefits are maximized on site, through clear communication, setting and meeting client expectations, and maintaining a strong Net Promoter Score.
- Commercial follow-through at the plant, managing
Whitefox's cartridge-replacement commitment program for clients, stock levels, generating quotes, and identifying opportunities for future expansion.
- Plant change management, staying current on
what's changing at each plant, new technologies, flagging the impact on cartridge life, energy, or operations, and sharing that back with Commercial and Innovation.
- Leading a cross-functional O&M team, including field technicians, process engineers, and Whitefox product team members, with responsibility for setting objectives, managing priorities, coordinating delivery, and ensuring contracted support activities are delivered effectively. This includes tracking O&M support hours and working with the Commercial team to develop engineering proposals for work outside the agreed contract scope.
- Site support readiness and travel flexibility, travelling to customer sites as needed to support commissioning, O&M activities, and other client needs as determined by the Customer Support Manager.
What you own outside the projects
- Supporting improve the team's efficiency, updating and creating templates, using tools such as AI to streamline recurring work, and contributing to internal projects as needed.
- Representing Whitefox at industry conferences, maintaining vendor and third-party network.
- Fully participating in the health & safety program, including hazard assessments, quarterly process safety review meetings and incident reporting.
Qualifications and Professional Experience Required
Education
- Bachelor's degree in a chemical engineering discipline from an accredited university
Experience
- 5+ years industry experience, Ethanol preferred but not a must. Skill gained from experience in an adjacent industry should transfer.
- Understanding and experience producing engineering deliverables, PFD, P&IDs, SOPs, and programming guidelines
- Site experience, working at production facility
- Experience leading a team toward a common goal
- Plus: Experience managing a client relationship across more than one site
Competencies
- Safety: Demonstrates an unwavering commitment to health and safety and consistently prioritizes safe work practices in all activities and decisions.
- Communication and Information Sharing: Serves as the central point of coordination for client-facing communications, ensuring information is accurate, timely, and appropriately shared with internal and external stakeholders.
- Collaboration and Teamwork: Works effectively with process design, detailed engineering, operations, and project teams to achieve shared technical and customer objectives.
- Strategic and Pragmatic Thinking: Applies sound judgment to assess complex issues, define appropriate ownership, and determine when escalation or support from other functions is required.
- Remote Accountability: Maintains ownership of commitments, priorities, and outcomes while working independently across geographically dispersed customer sites and internal teams.
- Learning Agility: Quickly develops proficiency in new technologies, processes, and operating environments and applies field learning to improve future performance.
- Integrity and Confidentiality: Protects client and Whitefox intellectual property and confidential information, builds trusted professional relationships, and maintains appropriate information boundaries between customer sites.
- Whitefox Blueprint: Consistently represents Whitefox's values, professional standards, and safety culture in interactions with customers and external stakeholders.
- Initiative/Self Starter: Ability to execute tasks and guide a team with little oversite. Ability to charter a path when the end goal is not 100% clear. Meets new problems with structured solutions and can be counted on keep things moving forward within their ownership. Escalates larger hurdles as needed.
Job Type:
Schedule:
- Standard US full-time hours (40 hrs/week),
- Monday to Friday, with the flexibility that a field-based role requires
- Travel within USA: 50%
Additional pay:
Benefits:
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Professional development assistance
