About Prime Controls
Established in 2004, Prime Controls, L.P. is a family-owned Systems Integration and I&C Construction firm dedicated to meeting clients’ industrial automation and control requirements. As a Main Automation Contractor, we offer comprehensive solutions, supported by our size, expertise, and extensive experience. With a professional team of 1000+ employees, Prime Controls serves customers nationwide from our Dallas, Texas headquarters and offices throughout the United States. Our mission is to deliver the highest quality professional services while prioritizing our employees’ well-being and fostering an exceptional workplace environment.
Position Summary
Prime Controls is hiring an Associate Developer to build the APIs, integrations, automations, and AI agents that connect our business and engineering systems. This role is designed for an early-career developer, including a recent computer science or software engineering graduate, who is genuinely fast with modern AI development tooling and uses it to produce working, supportable software rather than one-off scripts.
The work is real and immediate. Prime is standing up API endpoints against internal engineering data, moving field-facing tools off spreadsheets and manual handoffs, and building AI agents that take repetitive work out of estimating, project controls, purchasing, and document handling. The Associate Developer will write that code, test it, document it, and hand it off in a state someone else can maintain.
This is not a help desk role and it is not an infrastructure role. Day-to-day support, identity, endpoint management, and network operations stay with Information Technology. This role sits in the Business Technology Group and partners closely with Engineering, IT, platform owners, and the business groups whose processes the work is meant to improve.
We expect the person in this role to grow. The intent is to add senior development leadership over time and build a small development function around it, so appetite for mentorship, code review, and rising standards matters more than a polished resume.
Key Responsibilities
API and Integration Development
- Build and maintain REST API endpoints that expose project and asset data from internal engineering systems to the tools that need it, including project asset lists consumed by field-facing applications.
- Implement authentication and authorization for internal and externally reachable applications using approved patterns such as JWT, Microsoft Entra ID, or issued API keys, following the standard selected with IT and BTG rather than inventing a new one per project.
- Develop integrations between enterprise platforms including ERP/MRP, engineering data systems, construction tracking platforms, Microsoft 365, and internal tools, using vendor APIs, file exchanges, and scheduled data movement.
- Write integration code that fails visibly and recoverably, including logging, error handling, retries, and alerting that tells someone when data stopped moving.
- Document endpoints, payloads, dependencies, and support expectations so integrations are transferable and not owner dependent.
AI Agent and Automation Development
- Build AI agents and assisted workflows against approved platforms, including Claude and the Microsoft AI stack, for defined business processes such as document review, data extraction, exception handling, and routine reporting.
- Turn manual and repetitive business processes into automations using Power Automate, Python, PowerShell, scripted jobs, and platform-native capability, selecting the lightest tool that will hold up.
- Define and test guardrails on any agent that touches business data: what it can access, what it can write, what it must escalate to a person, and how its output is verified.
- Measure what the automation actually changed. Every agent or automation is expected to carry a before-and-after number such as time per transaction, keying error rate, or cycle time.
- Evaluate native platform capability before building custom, consistent with BTG governance.
Internal Application Development and Support
- Contribute to internal applications, including JavaScript-based field and project tools, with a focus on refinement, integration, and stability rather than rebuilds.
- Take ownership of assigned components: fix defects, improve usability, and keep the application deployable.
- Improve user experience on internal tools, working from real user feedback captured from the field and office.
- Support version control discipline, code review, branching, and release practices as the development function matures.
AI-Assisted Engineering Practice
- Use AI development tooling as a primary part of the daily workflow, including code generation, refactoring, test creation, documentation, and debugging.
- Review and verify AI-generated output. Understanding why the code works is a requirement of the role, not an optional step.
- Share working patterns, prompts, and reusable approaches with BTG and Engineering so productivity gains spread beyond one person.
- Operate within Prime's AI governance policy, including approved tools, data handling rules, and review expectations.
Collaboration, Security, and Documentation
- Work with IT on infrastructure, security review, licensing, identity, and hosting before anything is exposed outside the network.
- Translate business requests into a scoped technical approach, and say clearly when a request should be a configuration change, a small automation, an internal application, or a vendor platform decision.
- Participate in testing and validation, including writing test cases and supporting user acceptance testing for changes that affect business workflows.
- Maintain documentation, handoff notes, and decision records for everything built.
- Route material changes through the Change Control Board and support the Change Management Coalition on adoption and rollout for tools that reach the field.
Qualifications
Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated ability. Recent graduates are encouraged to apply.
- Working proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, JavaScript or TypeScript, or C#.
- Understanding of REST APIs, JSON, HTTP, and basic authentication concepts, demonstrated through coursework, internships, personal projects, or prior work.
- Familiarity with relational databases and SQL sufficient to read a schema, write queries, and reason about data relationships.
- Demonstrated hands-on use of AI development tools to produce working software, with the ability to explain what the tool produced and why it is correct.
- Evidence of initiative: projects started and finished without being assigned, problems pursued past the first obstacle, and work shipped rather than shelved.
- Ability to communicate clearly with people who are not developers, including field and office staff describing a problem in their own terms.
- Willingness to work onsite at the Lewisville headquarters, with occasional travel to regional offices or project sites.
Preferred
- Internship, co-op, or project experience building or consuming production APIs.
- Experience with Git-based version control and collaborative code review.
- Exposure to the Microsoft stack, including Power Platform, SharePoint, Microsoft Graph, or Entra ID.
- Exposure to cloud services, containerization, or CI/CD pipelines.
- Coursework or project work in machine learning, natural language processing, or agent frameworks.
- Interest in construction, industrial automation, controls, or manufacturing environments.
- Any experience turning a manual process into an automated one, at any scale.
Initial 90-Day Priorities
- Complete onboarding to Prime's development environment, source control, AI tooling, and AI governance policy, and understand what data may be used where.
- Learn the current system landscape: ERP/MRP, engineering data platforms, internal tools, construction tracking pilots, and the integration points already in place.
- Deliver one production API endpoint end to end, including authentication, documentation, and testing, under the direction of the assigned technical owner.
- Take ownership of one existing internal application component and close a defined backlog of defects and usability items.
- Build one AI agent or automation against a real business process with a measured before-and-after result.
- Produce documentation for everything touched in the first ninety days, to the standard that lets another developer pick it up.
- Identify two additional automation candidates from direct observation of how the business works, with an estimate of effort and expected benefit.