Director of Operational Technology

About Canopy Aerospace & Defense

Canopy A&D is built to accelerate the future of advanced materials for space, defense, and maritime systems. Canopy delivers specialized materials and components that carry customers from concept through sustainment. Canopy A&D’s advanced signal attenuation technologies and production-scale manufacturing accelerate the fielding of platforms that are faster, cooler, and quieter. Our adaptive approach ensures solutions evolve at the pace of shifting challenges, keeping our customers ahead of the curve.

Canopy Aerospace & Defense is seeking a hands-on Director of Operational Technology to serve as second-in-command to the CIO and to own day-to-day manufacturing technology and IT operations from our Irvine, California facility. The OT environment is the center of gravity for this role: the machine-tool network, the controllers and inspection systems attached to it, and the segmentation and controls that keep that environment both running and compliant.

The successful candidate will be on the production floor and in the network room weekly — troubleshooting a controller segment, validating a restore, closing a control gap — while leading a team, managing vendors, owning a budget, and standing behind the environment during customer and third-party assessments. Uptime on the shop floor and demonstrable compliance are the same problem here, and this role owns both.

• Own the manufacturing network and every device on it: CNC and multi-axis machining centers, CMMs and metrology, thermal processing and coating equipment controls, PLCs, HMIs, SCADA and historian systems, test cells, and shop-floor data collection.
• Maintain an accurate, continuously updated OT asset inventory — controller model, OS and firmware version, network address, criticality, owner, and patch or compensating-control status.
• Design and enforce segmentation between enterprise and plant-floor zones using a defensible zone-and-conduit model (Purdue / ISA-95, IEC 62443, NIST SP 800-82). Own the industrial DMZ and control every conduit that crosses it.
• Manage legacy and ‘unpatchable’ machine controllers through isolation, allow listing, media control, jump-host access, monitoring, and documented compensating controls that survive assessor scrutiny.
• Own secure, controlled transfer of NC code, program files, and inspection data between engineering, ERP/PLM, and the shop floor — including removable-media policy and its technical enforcement.
• Set network, security, and remote-access requirements for new equipment at the purchase-specification stage, in partnership with Manufacturing Engineering, Quality, and Facilities. Vendor remote access is a decision this role owns, not a concession made at installation.
• Own OT business continuity: controller images, post-processor and parameter backups, tested restores, and documented recovery objectives for production-critical systems.

• Own day-to-day IT service delivery for multiple sites — incidents, requests, change and problem management — and serve as senior escalation and, when needed, the person who does the work.
• Maintain up-time for systems that stop the line: ERP/MES, DNC and machine-tool file transfer, shop-floor data collection, quality and inspection systems, labeling and travelers, time and attendance.
• Own core infrastructure and its lifecycle:
  Windows Server and Active Directory, Microsoft 365 / Entra , virtualization, enterprise networking, storage, backup and disaster recovery, and endpoint management.
• Support the environments behind ERP, CAD/CAM, PLM, simulation, and metrology, including license servers, high-performance workstations, and large-file storage performance.