Technical search for industrial automation and robotics in Vietnam.
Vietnam's factories were built on labour cost, and that advantage is narrowing. Wages in the industrial provinces keep rising, and the customers behind China+1 relocations now expect traceability, stable yields and audit-ready processes that manual lines struggle to deliver. Automation has moved from a cost decision to a condition of winning the next order. Most of that work here is integration rather than invention — making systems designed elsewhere run in a specific plant, alongside the people who will operate them afterwards. Vietnam has only had automated lines at this scale for about a decade, so the distance between two engineers holding the same title is wider here than in markets that have been doing it for forty years.
That distance sits in one place: whether the engineer built the line or inherited it. The same title covers both. One has taken a line through FAT, SAT and ramp-up — function blocks written for a new cell, servo axes tuned, interlocks signed off with the safety team. The other has kept a mature line alive: timers adjusted, I/O forced, a shift recovered at 3am, many times over, on a system someone else designed.
Neither is better. They are just not interchangeable, and a CV won't tell you which one you're reading. The mismatch shows up at 2am, when something fails and nobody who designed the line is in the country. On most floors here, the person programming the robot cell is the person who wrote the PLC code feeding it. Kelson searches for both together.
Roles we search for
Controls and systems engineering
Controls engineer · PLC programmer · DCS engineer · SCADA engineer · HMI developer · Motion control and drives engineer · Instrumentation engineer · Process control engineer · Batch control engineer · Functional safety engineer
Robot programming and cell integration
Robot programmer · Robotics integration engineer · Robot cell designer · End-of-arm tooling engineer · Offline programming and simulation engineer · Welding robot specialist · Dispensing and painting robot engineer · Palletising and packaging automation engineer · Cobot deployment specialist
Machine vision and inspection
Machine vision engineer · Vision systems integrator · 3D vision and bin-picking engineer · Optical inspection engineer · Optics and lighting engineer
AMR and intralogistics automation
AMR and AGV deployment engineer · Navigation and SLAM engineer · Fleet management software engineer · Warehouse automation engineer · Safety and compliance engineer
Mechanical and machine design
Machine design engineer · Mechatronics engineer · Special purpose machine designer · Conveyor and material handling engineer · Pneumatics and hydraulics engineer · Control panel and electrical design engineer
Integration and commissioning
Systems integration engineer · Commissioning engineer · FAT and SAT engineer · Project engineer · Automation project manager · Line integration lead · Installation and site supervisor · Retrofit and upgrade specialist
Manufacturing IT and digital
MES engineer · SCADA and MES integration lead · ERP and MES integration specialist · Industrial IoT engineer · Digital twin engineer · Data historian engineer · OT network engineer · Industrial cybersecurity specialist · Digital transformation manager
Maintenance and reliability
Maintenance manager · Reliability engineer · Predictive maintenance lead · Condition monitoring engineer · Automation maintenance engineer · Electrical maintenance supervisor · Mechanical maintenance supervisor · TPM and maintenance systems manager · Spare parts and asset manager
Applications and technical sales
Application engineer · Technical sales engineer · Product manager · Solution architect · Customer support engineer
Leadership
Head of automation · Engineering manager · Engineering director · Maintenance director · Technical director · Plant digitalisation lead · Smart factory programme manager
These searches start at a gross monthly package of around 50 million VND, or below that when several roles are open at once.
What we look at
What they commissioned versus what they maintained. Building a line and keeping one alive are different professions. Which platforms they have actually commissioned and at what scale, a cell, a line or a whole plant: Siemens TIA Portal, Rockwell Studio 5000, Mitsubishi GX Works, Beckhoff TwinCAT. Whether they wrote the code or inherited it, and whether anyone else can read it. OEE and unplanned downtime before and after their work, and whether the line held up once they had handed over. For safety roles: whether they have carried out a risk assessment and SIL or PL validation under IEC 61508 or ISO 13849, not just wired a safety relay. For machine design: what they designed from a blank sheet, and whether it is still running. For integration and commissioning: the largest scope they took from FAT through SAT to ramp-up, and what went wrong in the last week before handover. For robotics: which platforms — ABB, FANUC, KUKA, Yaskawa or Universal Robots — what cycle time they reached, and how they handled part variation and tolerance stack-up in production. For machine vision: which systems they deployed, Cognex, Keyence, Halcon or an in-house stack, the false reject rate they reached, and how they handled lighting and part presentation, which is where most vision projects actually fail. For AMR and intralogistics: fleet size, how the robots coped with a floor shared with people and forklifts, and what the navigation did the first time the layout changed. For MES and IIoT: what integrated with what, ERP, SCADA or historian, over OPC UA or MQTT, and whether the data ever changed a decision. For applications and technical sales: which solutions they specified, and whether the plant reached the throughput that was quoted.
The deep pool here is in maintenance and operations on mature lines. Commissioning and new system integration capability sits mostly with a small group of system integrators and a handful of tier-one manufacturers. It is thinner for greenfield plants needing someone who has taken a whole facility from URS to handover, and for proprietary robot design rather than cell integration — roles Vietnam has historically filled with Vietnamese returnees from Japan, Korea and Europe or international engineers. That is changing, but slowly. If your role sits there, expect a longer search and often an international one. We would rather say that at the start than send you a shortlist that does not hold up.