Process Engineer – AI & Automation

Cognascents is looking for a Process Engineer – AI & Automation. We’re looking for a mid-level process engineer — typically 4–5 years of process engineering experience — who has taught themselves enough applied AI to build practical tools and agents that accelerate technical work. A Chemical Engineering degree is required. This role is based in Houston, TX.

Who You’ll Work With

You will work alongside a strong team of process safety engineers who facilitate PHAs and deliver process hazard analysis services to clients. You will not be facilitating those sessions yourself — your job is to build the agents and tools that make their work faster and more defensible, which means understanding PHA, LOPA, and PSM well enough to engineer software around them. The work must adhere to industry standards and best practices.

You will work directly with Cognascents’ process safety, mechanical integrity, and engineering leadership teams to build and maintain the AI infrastructure that powers our consulting delivery. As a member of the AI & Automation function, you will own pipelines, agentic workflows, and internal applications that our engineers rely on daily to serve clients across refining, petrochemicals, and industrial facilities.

At Cognascents, we believe in people with strong integrity and competence who are loyal to our customers, coworkers, families, and communities.

If this sounds like an opportunity of interest to you or someone you know, please apply or send us your resume and cover letter to hello@cognascents.com.

One thing we ask in your application: point us to an AI tool or agent you have built, and tell us in a few sentences how you broke the problem down — and one thing that broke and how you fixed it.

About the Role

You will be a core builder of Cognascents’ AI delivery infrastructure – the technical backbone behind our AI-accelerated, human-led consulting model. Your work directly shapes how 65+ engineers deliver process safety and mechanical integrity services to clients across the Gulf Coast and beyond. Day-to-day work spans application development, cloud deployment, LLM and agent integrations, and building tooling that engineering teams depend on in production.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and own client-facing AI tools and agents — taking them from prototype through validation to daily production use by engineering teams
  • Build agents and AI-powered workflows that automate and accelerate process safety and engineering tasks, from document analysis to deliverable generation
  • Develop pipelines for data ingestion, transformation, and analysis across structured and unstructured engineering data sources
  • Decompose engineering problems into well-scoped, reusable agent tasks and components — including multi-step or orchestrated agent workflows where they improve reliability — that apply across client engagements
  • Build the evaluation and guardrails that make AI output trustworthy — test harnesses, regression checks on prompts, failure-mode handling, and cost and latency discipline — so every tool holds up under the firm’s 100% senior-review standard
  • Stay current on emerging AI tools and evaluate their practical applicability to consulting operations

Minimum Requirements

  • Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and 4–5 years of process engineering experience in refining, petrochemicals, LNG, specialty chemicals, or related oil and gas operations
  • Working knowledge of a major cloud platform, Azure preferred; a formal certification such as AZ-900 is a plus, not a requirement
  • Proficient in Python — comfortable building and maintaining real applications, including API integration, async patterns, and structured error handling
  • Comfortable deploying and running applications in a cloud environment, ideally Azure (AWS acceptable)
  • Hands-on experience integrating REST APIs and working with structured data such as JSON and typed model outputs
  • Comfortable with Git-based version control and collaborative development
  • Has personally built and shipped working AI tooling — agents, LLM-powered applications, or automation artifacts — that delivered measurable acceleration in a real technical workflow (not coursework demos alone)
  • Practical command of the agent-builder toolkit — prompt design, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and retrieval grounding (RAG) — plus the judgment to know when an agent is warranted and when deterministic code is the more reliable choice
  • Understands how to make AI output trustworthy: testing and evaluating agent behavior, handling failure modes and hallucination, and managing token cost and latency
  • Ability to read documentation, debug independently, and translate a business problem into a practical technical solution
  • Clear communicator who can work across both technical and non-technical audiences
  • Must be able to legally work in the United States

Preferred (Not Required)

  • Experience designing multi-agent or orchestrated systems — a coordinating agent that delegates to specialized sub-agents
  • Familiarity with enterprise LLM deployment under data-privacy constraints, such as Azure OpenAI with Zero Data Retention
  • Formal process hazard analysis background — PHA/HAZOP, LOPA, or PSM/RMP familiarity beyond general process experience
  • Professional Engineer (PE) license, or active progress toward one

Travel Requirements:

Minimal travel anticipated. Primarily on-site at Cognascents Houston headquarters.

Compensation & Benefits Highlights:

  • Competitive Salary
  • Medical benefits
  • Simple IRA savings plan
  • Paid volunteer time

About Cognascents

Cognascents is an established engineering firm deeply rooted in integrity, ethical values, and an unwavering commitment to quality. Our meticulous attention to detail sets us apart as we embark on a journey to excellence alongside our valued clients. We serve as a long-term engineering solutions provider to our clients, prioritizing service excellence with a 360-degree vision that encompasses every facet of your needs.

Our multidisciplinary team comprises more than 65 process safety and asset integrity engineers, guided by an accomplished and involved leadership team with deep expertise, and provides a unique and technical perspective to problem-solving. Our strength lies in pairing our deep technical expertise with a customer-driven approach to offer innovative solutions to even the most complex challenges. This synergy enables us to systematically analyze data to customize solutions to meet specific needs. With 600+ projects delivered over 15 years, AI is now our value multiplier — agentic engineering workflows accelerate delivery, and every deliverable receives 100% review and sign-off by a senior engineer before it is issued. No exceptions. We are the partner that makes AI work where it must be right.