Operations Surveillance & Support Engineering Intern

Job Summary:

The Operations Surveillance & Support Engineering (OSSE) Internship pairs an intern with a single, well-defined summer project sponsored by either Operations or HSSE. The intern owns that project end-to-end: understanding the sponsor's need, scoping the project around it, planning and tracking its execution, and delivering a final result and close-out readout before the internship ends. The role draws on two of the skill sets that run throughout OSSE's day-to-day work — business analysis (understanding the sponsor's need and asking the right questions to shape it into a clear objective) and project management (building that objective into a scoped plan and driving it to completion) — though these represent part of OSSE's broader scope, which also includes operational surveillance, customer coordination, and reporting. Throughout the summer, the intern is mentored by the OSSE team, which helps guide the project and shares the judgment OSSE applies every day to serving Operations, HSSE, and WES's customers well. The internship gives the intern a hands-on introduction to how OSSE operates, with the project's success depending on that same translation from a defined need into a concrete, deliverable result, carried out within a fixed, summer-length timeline.

Roles & Responsibilities:

• Partner with an OSSE mentor and the sponsoring Operations or HSSE stakeholder to scope the summer project, turning a loosely defined business need into a clear objective and set of deliverables.
• Conduct stakeholder conversations with the project sponsor to understand their need and ask the right questions to shape it into a clear objective.
• Build and maintain a lightweight project plan tracking milestones, deliverables, and dependencies through the course of the summer.
• Execute the project's core work, which may include process analysis, data gathering, or building a reporting/dashboard component in partnership with the Operations Reporting Analyst.
• Provide regular status updates to the OSSE Manager and project sponsor, surfacing risks, blockers, or scope changes as they arise.
• Deliver a final project readout summarizing outcomes, lessons learned, and any recommended follow-on work.
• Spend time with each of OSSE's three domains — Planning & Coordination, Technical Surveillance, and Reporting — to build a working understanding of how the team supports Operations as a whole.

Required Knowledge, Experience & Skills:

• Currently working toward a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (e.g., Industrial, Mechanical, Chemical, or Petroleum), a Bachelor of Business Administration, or a Bachelor of Science in Data Science, or a closely related field (rising junior or senior preferred).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including comfort interviewing stakeholders across varying levels of seniority.
• Basic proficiency in Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint); exposure to Power BI, Power Apps, or Power Automate is a plus but not required.
• Organized and self-directed, with the ability to manage a project with real deliverables and a fixed deadline.
• Interest in oil and gas midstream operations, health/safety/environmental practices, or process improvement.

Example Project Areas:

The specific project assigned to an intern will be scoped at the start of the internship based on current business need, so the examples below aren't a menu to choose from — they're meant to illustrate the kind of problem OSSE takes on and the scale of work an internship project is built around: a real operational or customer-facing need, translated into a scoped result over a single summer.

• Skim oil hauling reporting redesign — reworking how skim oil haul volumes and costs are captured and reported to reflect a changing business need, including an assessment of the operational and financial impact of the change.
• Customer-facing reporting and analytics dashboard — building a dashboard that gives a customer direct visibility into relevant operational data, in a format tailored to their needs.
• Compressor fuel gas usage analysis — identifying the highest fuel-gas-consuming compressor units by pairing operational run-time data with financial OPEX data to surface cost-reduction opportunities.
• Pig tracking and reporting — improving how pipeline pigging runs are tracked and reported to Operations and other stakeholders.
• Other similar process-improvement, reporting, or analytics projects scoped around a specific Operations or HSSE need as they arise.

Travel Requirements:

• The percentage of travel required for this position is 0% -5%.

Work Schedule:

• This position utilizes a Hybrid work schedule: Monday–Thursday (9-hour days) and Friday (4-hour day), with occasional flexibility for business needs and field visit scheduling.
• WES reserves the right to change employees’ schedule if it is required by operations.