Jordan Cota | Controls & Automation Engineer

// About

I've been in controls and automation since 2017. I started HVAC and then moved to food & beverage, where I built a maintenance ticketing system from the ground up, and put a status light on the production floor so anyone could see at a glance whether the line was running. Simple ideas that worked. Since then I've connected PLCs, built SCADA systems, integrated protocols most people haven't touched, and made machines readable to the people running them. I don't wait to be handed a problem. I find it, figure it out, and build something that lasts.

I studied at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton with a focus in history, where I received an Associate's Degree. I have a wide variety of passions and enjoy many activities in my free time: pickleball, making kombucha, hiking with friends, long walks on the beach, the discovery of new hobbies, and the Oxford comma. I love working on my 1986 BMW K75 and old radios; I have a STA-78 Realistic upstairs and a Sansui A2000 in the living area. I built this website by hand in HTML (a lot of help from claude), so I'm always tinkering in the analog and digital world.

Lead a team of 12 maintenance professionals supporting material-handling and conveyance controls across two Amazon last-mile (AMZL) sites, owning all controls projects and site automation metrics.
Delivered 4 major controls installation projects while the site held top-quartile performance within the AMZL network.
Designing a change-managed controls modification that cuts e-stop recovery downtime from roughly 30 seconds to 3 seconds across 9–10 daily events.
Drive uptime through real-time performance monitoring, root-cause analysis, and control-logic modification across both sites.

Led hardware and software deployments for manufacturing controls across North America, co-managing a three-person team to connect 100+ devices through IIoT edge gateways over Ethernet, WiFi, and cellular using MQTT, delivering 27 real-time dashboards and 24 interfaces with zero client churn.
Directed customer meetings and technical trainings, driving adoption by 85+ users while producing training videos and documentation.
Saved $36,000 in licensing fees per customer by developing a FANUC FOCAS tag list for OEE monitoring and optimizing data schemas.
Owned the full lifecycle from integration through ongoing support, and proposed product features to align development with client needs.

Built full-OEE KPI lists for the MTConnect protocol on Haas machines and Hypertherm controllers, capturing real-time data across the metric set.
Upgraded an Arduino-based industrial water-monitoring system into a robust Modbus TCP application and programmed SCADA displays for real-time monitoring.
Saved customers over $20,000 in upgrade costs by partnering with the EDGE team to develop new drivers for the DH+ protocol on Allen-Bradley PLC-5s and the MicroLogix family.
Delivered 100+ dashboards and operational efficiency reports, and engineered pneumatic-sensor inputs to capture OEE where photoeye application wasn't feasible.

Maintained and diagnosed electrical power systems, including 480V power quality and 24V control power, using oscilloscopes, scope meters, and BMS software.
Managed industrial robotics (robotic arm work cells, drives, AGV systems, and guidance), raising robotic uptime by 20% when on shift.
Administered over 9 miles of smart logistics equipment (PLCs, VFDs, vision systems) and advised operations with regular KPI and flow-monitoring reports.
Trained journey-level RME personnel and mechatronics apprentices, and served as liaison between maintenance and operations during critical incidents.

Led continuous-improvement projects that reduced operating cost and fire risk, including an LED lighting transition and an HVAC replacement to heat pumps with UV protection.
Increased sugar-line performance by 5.5% by designing a new conveyance layout that optimized material flow and reduced bottlenecks.
Implemented the site's first machine-monitoring system (andons) and a maintenance ticketing system enabling historical analysis.

Installed, serviced, and troubleshot single-phase and three-phase residential and light-commercial HVAC systems, including R-22 and R-410A equipment.
Troubleshot HVAC controls, including BACnet building automation systems and VFD installations.
Diagnosed and repaired electrical and control faults across packaged and split systems, restoring reliable operation and minimizing downtime.

Education · University of West Georgia · Associate's, History | Lean Six Sigma White Belt · NFPA 70E / LOTO

Forklift Conveyor System

The client wanted uptime/downtime and daily part counts on this conveyance system. I communicated with the CompactLogix Allen-Bradley PLC, pulled the key variables into our monitoring system, and built an iPad dashboard so operators could log downtime reasons in real time. This was part of a 60-machine rollout connected via 30 cellular gateways, requiring close collaboration with the client's IT, Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, OEMs, and floor operators.

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Water Quality: Modbus TCP Conversion

I retrofitted a legacy Arduino-based monitoring system into a standard Modbus TCP application to future-proof it. The client needed real-time pH, chlorine (FCL), water temperature, and flow (GPM) with alarming across several water stations. The original system used I2C and the installer had been bought out, so I converted the signals from I2C to 4–20mA and into a Modbus TCP analog input module.

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Dashboard Examples

A few more dashboards I've built across industrial protocols: EtherNet/IP (Allen-Bradley), DH+, Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU, OPC-UA, MTConnect, TCP, and FOCAS (Fanuc CNC).