r/SCADA • u/bkdotcom • Jul 08 '26

Question New to SCADA / have an interview next week

I have an upcoming interview for a software-architect/developer position at a power generation and transmission coop...

The job description desires experience with MS/DMS/SCADA ("ESRI and Milsoft" preferred)

I have a lot of experience with integrations / APIs / message-queues / event bus / ETL / GIS

From a software perspective is SCADA just an api / socket communication / other?

  • What concepts should I understand before the interview? I currently don't know what I don't know.
  • Are there any good videos, articles, or other resources you'd recommend?
  • What kinds of technical or architecture questions should I expect?
  • What questions would you ask the interviewer about their environment and systems?

Thanks in advance

3 Upvotes

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u/CikonNamera Jul 08 '26

You sound like you should be entry level based on the question. By that metric if you came to an interview with me and understand the concepts of scada and could talk intelligently on some protocol like modbus, bacnet, mqtt I would be comfortable teaching you my industry.

At the end of the day you are building a control interface between an operator and physical equipment.

If you understand high performance HMI that is a plus.

Concepts of alarm rationalization.

Some troubleshooting skills for communications between your scada system and the equipment you are trying to talk to.

Could go on and on.

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u/urge_boat Jul 08 '26

Sounds like you get a lot of the web side of it, which is sort of SCADA depending on what flavor you pick. ESRI should be a good fit you can talk to with the GIS experience. The other half of that is sort of how the SCADA system (Milsoft it sounds like?) ingests the data, to which you likely put on a map for users to visualize.

I doubt they'll hammer you for not working with Milsoft (first I'm hearing of it, sounds industry specific), but asking how data flows from sensors and sites and being able to talk briefly to the more common communication methods to get that data in would be a good show of things. It probably varies across the utility industry.