Chemelex is a global leader in electric thermal and sensing solutions, protecting the world’s critical processes, places and people. With over 50 years of innovation and a commitment to excellence, we develop solutions that ensure safety, reliability, and efficiency in diverse environments – from industrial plants and data centers to people’s homes. We deliver future-ready technologies, advanced engineering capabilities and local expertise backed by global standards. Our offering includes a leading portfolio from our trusted brands: Raychem, Tracer, Nuheat and Pyrotenax.
About the role
SmartTrace is Chemelex's cloud platform for monitoring electrical heat tracing (EHT) at large industrial sites: refineries, chemical plants, and other process facilities. Heat trace cable keeps pipelines from freezing and holds process fluids at temperature. A single refinery can run thousands of heat trace circuits, and when one fails it becomes an operations problem very quickly.
SmartTrace polls those field controllers over Modbus, streams the telemetry to the cloud, normalizes settings across a dozen incompatible controller families, raises and validates alarms, and gives operators one screen to triage from without needing an EHT specialist on every shift.
We are hiring an intermediate developer to build features in that platform, with an emphasis on the part where software meets real hardware. You will write Node.js and TypeScript in our FOX repository, and a meaningful share of your work will involve talking to physical heat trace controllers: adding support for new device families, mapping their register layouts, making mass-programming operations reliable, and chasing down why a controller three provinces away reported a temperature that cannot possibly be right.
This is not a role where hardware is an abstraction behind someone else's API. You will have controllers on a bench, you will read Modbus register maps from vendor manuals, and you will see your code move a setpoint on a real device.
Currently this role is based off of a 6-month contract with the possibly to convert into full time but not guaranteed.
Hybrid Role based in Kitchener.
What you will work on
Device drivers and integrations. Add and extend support for heat trace controller families (Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU, and Modbus ASCII over serial-to-Ethernet gateways, plus CANbus for bridge-attached devices). Each new controller family means reading the vendor register map, modelling the device's settings and metrics in our generic device schema, and proving it works against real hardware.
Telemetry ingestion at scale. Work on the pipeline that carries device messages from the on-site Supervisor service, over persistent WebSockets, through NATS, and into PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB. Our production sites generate millions of queue messages a day, so efficiency of the wire format and the read pattern is a real design constraint, not a theoretical one.
Cloud API features. Build and extend REST and WebSocket endpoints in our Node.js and TypeScript API: alarms, settings, device metrics, reporting, and the integrations that push heat trace data out to customer DCS and SCADA systems over OPC-UA.
Mass programming and field operations. Improve the tooling that reprograms thousands of devices at once, including batching, queueing, pre-transmission validation, and recovery when a device does not answer.
Front-end when the feature needs it. Our operator dashboard is React and Redux. You are not expected to be a front-end specialist, but you should be able to carry a feature through the UI layer rather than handing it off at the API boundary.
At Chemelex:
We protect places of progress through electric excellence.
Pioneering plants, sprawling data centers, busy transport hubs, and your own home. These are the places that bring progress to the world, and the places that we protect with time-tested technologies, advanced engineering, and a suite of services. Because here, excellence is everything.
Our Dimensions of Excellence reflect the core values of Chemelex. Together, they inspire our decisions and guide our actions – defining excellence in our work for colleagues, customers and communities.
- Experts with empathy
- Explorer mindset
- Example for others
- Exceptional impact
We are committed to equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by national, federal, state or local law.
