Senior Utility Protection & Control Engineer

Shermco Industries; Rahway (NJ); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Shermco is seeking an experienced Senior Electrical Engineer specializing in protection and control for utility clients in the US Northeast. The role focuses on relay settings, coordination reviews, trip investigations, and modernization efforts across distribution and substation projects.

You will contribute to design packages, field testing, and project delivery while mentoring junior engineers and liaising with utilities to improve reliability and system performance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or closely related discipline.
• Approximately 10+ years of directly relevant utility protection and control experience or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience developing protective relay settings and performing protection coordination and fault analysis.
• Strong working knowledge of utility distribution substations and feeders, protective-device coordination, relay settings, feeder and transformer protection, relay logic, and protection application principles.
• Experience investigating relay events, trips, outages, or misoperations and translating findings into practical recommendations.
• Ability to independently prepare calculations, settings files, technical reports, specifications, and design documentation.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work directly with utility engineering and operations personnel.

Responsibilities

• Perform protection analysis and coordination reviews for utility distribution and substation systems.
• Review relay settings, fault-current impacts, and protection changes associated with breakers, relays, reclosers, fuses, and related equipment.
• Evaluate protective-device coordination, feeder and transformer protection, and the field application of protection schemes.
• Develop or review protection philosophies, application practices, calculations, and settings documentation.
• Support commissioning, field testing, and validation of protection systems.
• Develop protection schemes for utility distribution and substation applications.
• Apply transformer differential, feeder, bus, breaker failure, and related protection functions as project needs require.
• Support relay logic, control narratives, sequence-of-operations documentation, and related design packages where needed.
• Support protection system replacement, upgrade, and modernization programs.
• Investigate unexpected trips to determine why a relay or breaker operated and recommend practical corrective actions.
• Perform root-cause investigations of trips, outages, and suspected protection misoperations.
• Develop clear technical findings and corrective-action recommendations.
• Communicate results through concise reports and customer presentations.
• Lead assigned engineering work with minimal oversight and maintain quality, schedule, and budget awareness.
• Perform technical reviews and mentor less-experienced engineers.
• Participate in customer meetings, design reviews, and technical discussions.
• Provide surge capacity and specialized expertise for critical utility programs and workforce gaps.

Skills

Relay settings

Protection coordination

Fault analysis

Substation protection

Technical leadership

Communication

Project documentation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering

Tools

SEL relays

Protection software

Job description

Shermco is seeking an experienced Senior Electrical Engineer specializing in protection and control for utility clients in the US Northeast. The role focuses on relay settings, coordination reviews, trip investigations, and modernization efforts across distribution and substation projects.

You will contribute to design packages, field testing, and project delivery while mentoring junior engineers and liaising with utilities to improve reliability and system performance.