Director of OT Engineering

Our client is seeking a Director of OT Engineering to lead the strategy, architecture, and delivery of the infrastructure platforms supporting mission-critical operational technology environments.

This role combines senior technical leadership with team management and long-term infrastructure planning. The Director will oversee the full OT infrastructure stack, including Active Directory, identity and access management, virtualization, enterprise storage, security appliances, backup and recovery, and platform services. The position requires a technically deep leader who understands how enterprise infrastructure technologies must be designed and operated differently within OT, IC

Working closely with the Director of OT Cybersecurity and other operational leaders, this individual will ensure OT infrastructure is resilient, secure, scalable, and aligned with both operational requirements and cybersecurity standards.

• Define and execute the OT engineering strategy, architecture standards, and multi-year infrastructure roadmap.
• Align infrastructure investments with operational reliability, cybersecurity, resiliency, scalability, and business objectives.
• Establish technical standards and reference architectures across OT compute, identity, storage, virtualization, endpoint, and platform services.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and determine appropriate adoption within highly controlled OT environments.
• Lead major infrastructure modernization, lifecycle, and platform transformation initiatives.

• Lead and develop a team of OT infrastructure, systems, endpoint, and platform engineers.
• Provide technical direction, architectural oversight, coaching, and escalation support for complex engineering issues.
• Establish clear engineering standards, operating procedures, documentation requirements, and technical governance.
• Build team capability through mentoring, structured training, cross-training, and professional certification programs.
• Support workforce planning, performance management, succession planning, and long-term team development.

• Own Active Directory architecture, administration, and governance across OT environments.
• Lead hybrid identity strategy spanning Active Directory and Microsoft Entra .
• Govern Group Policy, directory services, identity lifecycle management, service accounts, and privileged access.
• Establish and maintain OT IAM standards including RBAC, MFA, Conditional Access, PAM, and Privileged Identity Management.
• Ensure identity architecture supports OT security requirements without compromising operational availability.

• Oversee OT virtualization and compute platforms including VMware vSphere/ESXi, Proxmox VE, and Kubernetes.
• Define standards for clustering, high availability, capacity management, lifecycle management, and performance optimization.
• Ensure platform architecture supports resilient and highly available OT workloads.
• Provide technical oversight for private cloud, containerization, and next-generation infrastructure initiatives as appropriate.

• Own the OT storage strategy across SAN, NAS, object storage, and software-defined storage platforms.
• Define backup, replication, retention, and recovery standards for critical OT workloads.
• Lead disaster recovery and business continuity planning, testing, and execution for OT infrastructure.
• Ensure recovery objectives are documented, tested, and aligned with operational risk requirements.

• Oversee the engineering and integration of security appliances supporting OT environments, including next-generation firewalls, NAC, IPS, and related platforms.
• Partner with OT Cybersecurity leadership to ensure infrastructure architecture aligns with segmentation, access control, monitoring, and threat mitigation strategies.
• Support deployment and governance of privileged access management platforms such as Cyber Ark, Beyond Trust, FortiPAM, or equivalent solutions.
• Ensure infrastructure configurations align with IEC 62443, NIST SP 800-82, CIS Benchmarks, and internal security standards.

• Establish and enforce configuration management, change control, patching, lifecycle, and documentation standards.
• Ensure infrastructure changes are implemented safely within mission-critical and production-sensitive OT environments.
• Drive capacity planning, infrastructure health monitoring, performance management, and technical risk reduction.
• Support observability and monitoring capabilities using platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, or similar technologies.
• Maintain accurate architecture diagrams, configuration documentation, standards, and operating procedures.

• Manage strategic vendor relationships, licensing, support agreements, procurement, and technical service providers.
• Own or contribute to OT engineering budgets,…