IoT ​/ OT Infrastructure Engineer- HYBRID

Contract | Simple Solutions | United States

Posted On 07/24/2026

Job Opening

Work Experience 10+ Years

70-80

City New York

State/Province New York

10001

More of Hardware role, migrating IoT devices, SD Access fabric.

3 days on site

The Client and Programme

Client
— The engagement is with their global IoT and Smart Buildings programme, which is migrating every non-PC device in their offices worldwide onto a dedicated network fabric fully segregated from the corporate network.

Devices in scope include
air quality sensors, occupancy sensors, smart lighting, CCTV cameras, BMS systems, and printers
. The programme is already live across Singapore and North America, with London and further global sites in progress.

The team is small and senior — an IoT Solutions Architect leads the technical delivery alongside an operations lead. This is not a large team with layers of support. The person hired will be expected to own problems independently.

Locations:New York (One New York Plaza, downtown) and London (25 Cabot Square). We are currently focused on filling the
New York role
as priority.

What Has Been Tried and What We've Learned

This role has been open for some time. Previous vendors attempted to fill it and failed. WWT won the engagement and has been running a structured screening process since.

We have screened and presented multiple candidates. Every rejection has come back with the same feedback — candidates are strong on infrastructure, Linux, or networking, but are not deep enough at the
IoT and OT application layer
. The team is not hiring a network engineer or a Windows admin. They have been very explicit about this.

The most important thing to understand:
the job title is misleading.The role was originally called Infrastructure Server Engineer. Client have confirmed this title is not accurate to the skillset. We are now calling it
IoT / OT Infrastructure Engineer
for all advertising and candidate-facing purposes.

The Role in Plain Language

The engineer sits between IoT devices, the Linux and Windows servers those devices communicate with, and the internal teams responsible for networking, security, proxy, and firewall. Their job is to onboard devices, configure and manage them at the device level, troubleshoot when data stops flowing, and own the resolution across whatever teams need to be involved.

This is
not
about building network infrastructure. It is about understanding how a device communicates to an application server, how that server is administered, and how the data flows all the way through to a cloud platform or dashboard.

The Updated Skillset — What We Need

• IoT device experience at the application layer
  — the candidate must understand how IoT devices communicate to application servers. Occupancy sensors, air quality monitors, smart lighting, CCTV — and crucially, what happens on the server side when those devices send data. Protocol knowledge matters here: MQTT is the most important. Candidates who only understand the network side (VLANs, firewall rules, MAC registration) will be rejected
• MQTT broker knowledge
  — the candidate should be able to describe the publisher/broker/subscriber model, name a broker (Mosquitto, EMQX), explain how to check whether a broker is running and healthy, and verify a device is publishing messages to it
• IoT endpoint management
  — firmware updates, certificate management, device configuration and lifecycle from onboarding through decommission. This has been a consistent gap across rejected candidates
• Regulated environment awareness
  — financial services change control, security architecture review processes, and multi-team approval workflows. Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, government agencies — any regulated environment counts
• Networking fundamentals at the right level
  — DNS, DHCP, NTP, proxy awareness, firewall concepts. Enough to engage the right team with the right question. Not a network engineering specialism

Important

• Linux server administration
  — daily hands-on Linux at the application layer, not just OS administration. Ability to troubleshoot services receiving IoT device data, check broker logs, diagnose why data has stopped flowing.…