Planning & Optimization Advisor/Engineer

About the role

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Position Summary

The Value Chain Optimization (VCO) organization is seeking a Planning & Optimization Advisor/Engineer to support the South Region, reporting to the Regional Planning Director - South. This role is responsible for developing and optimizing refinery and value chain plans across short-term planning horizons to maximize profitability, strengthen operational performance, and support strategic decision-making.

The successful candidate will independently manage refinery forecasting and planning activities, utilizing regional linear programming (LP) models to evaluate opportunities, identify constraints, and optimize value chain outcomes. This individual will conduct scenario and sensitivity analyses, maintain and enhance planning models, and leverage historical performance reviews and forecasting insights to improve planning effectiveness.

Working closely with Operations, Commercial, Logistics, and Planning teams, the Advisor/Engineer will help align plans across refineries and regions while supporting the execution of operating strategies. The role offers broad exposure to refinery economics, Gulf Coast market dynamics, and enterprise-wide value chain optimization. Additionally, this position leads planning studies and optimization initiatives while providing technical guidance and mentorship to less experienced team members.

Key Responsibilities

• Leads planning studies and optimization projects independently while providing technical guidance to less experienced advisors
• Leads the development, testing, validation, and implementation of planning and optimization model enhancements for the South Region.
• Acts as a key liaison between regional planning teams, Operations Research, and leadership to ensure alignment on priorities and outcomes.
• Partners with Operations Research and cross-functional stakeholders to define requirements, evaluate impacts, and deploy model changes.
• Coordinates user acceptance testing (UAT), scenario analysis, and rollout activities to ensure successful implementation and adoption.
• Assesses and manages impacts to planning tools, reports, and workflows resulting from model changes, minimizing disruption to business operations.
• Collaborates with IT, analytics, and business teams to deliver necessary tool updates and process improvements.
• Serves as the team's PIMS subject matter expert, providing technical support, training, troubleshooting, and best-practice guidance.
• Maintains documentation, and communication plans related to model and system changes.
• Develops and optimizes short-term, mid-term, and lookback plans using local, regional and cross-regional LP models to maximize refinery and value chain performance.
• Manages refinery forecasting and planning activities independently, ensuring plans remain aligned with operational capabilities, market conditions, and business objectives.
• Maintains and enhances LP models by validating assumptions, modifying constraints, and improving model accuracy to reflect refinery operating realities.
• Identifies emerging constraints and value opportunities and develops optimization strategies to improve refinery and value chain performance and operational results.
• Performs scenario and sensitivity analyses to evaluate impacts of changing market conditions, operational constraints, disruptions, and strategic initiatives.
• Integrates historical performance reviews, backcast analyses, and scenario evaluations to improve forecasting accuracy and planning effectiveness.
• Partners with Operations, Commercial, Logistics, and Planning teams to align plans across planning horizons, refineries and regions and supports execution of operating strategies.

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering required. A Bachelor's degree in another field may be considered with five (5) years of experience in refinery planning, optimization, value chain, operations, commercial, logistics or related technical experience required.
• Four (4) years of refinery planning, optimization, value chain analysis, operations, commercial, logistics, or related experience required.

Skills

• Analytical Thinking - Strong problem-solving skills to identify architectural challenges, analyze requirements, evaluate options, and propose effective solutions.
• Building Partnerships - Developing and leveraging relationships within and across work groups to achieve results.
• Business Acumen - Applies knowledge of MPC's business, industry and the marketplace to advance the organization's goals. Makes decisions and recommendations clearly linked to MPC's strategy.
• Business Domain Knowledge - Understanding of business processes, industry trends, and market dynamics to provide relevant and actionable insights for strategic decision-making.
• Commodity Market Analysis - Applies knowledge of commodity markets, price dynamics, and supply-demand fundamentals to inform planning, optimization, and commercial decision-making.
• Continuous Improvement Mindset - Identifies and leads opportunities for continuous improvement and value creation, both incremental and large-scale.
• Data Analysis - Data Analysis is the process of identifying, evaluating, interpreting and organizing data so that it can be used for business decisions. It includes sorting through data to identify patterns and establish relationships.
• Decision Support Analytics - Leverages analytics, reporting, and decision frameworks to generate insights, evaluate alternatives, and support informed, data-driven decision-making.
• Influencing Others - The ability to garner support for initiatives by gaining the respect of others and inspiring trust and confidence.
• Integrated Planning & Optimization - Designs and manages integrated planning processes that align supply, demand, and operational constraints to optimize value across the enterprise value chain.
• Metrics Management - The process of monitoring performance indicators that demonstrate how effectively a unit/ business/ function/ company is achieving key objectives.
• Optimization Modeling - Applies optimization models and quantitative techniques to evaluate scenarios, improve system performance, and support complex operational and commercial decisions.
• Scenario Planning - Design and evaluate alternative future states to stress-test strategies and inform resilient decision-making.
• Stakeholder Engagement - Build alignment across internal and external stakeholders to support shared objectives.
• Systems Thinking - The ability to analyze complex systems and understand their interdependencies, considering both technical and business aspects, to develop comprehensive and scalable architectures.

• As an energy industry leader, our career opportunities fuel personal and professional growth.
• Location: Houston, Texas

Additional locations

• Job Requisition ID: 00025248
• Location Address: 500 Dallas St Ste 2900
• Education: Bachelors (Required)
• Employee Group: Full time
• Employee Subgroup: Regular