Principal Specialist Data Modeling & Arch (Operational Technology)

About Ma'aden

Ma'aden, established in 1997, is a prominent and rapidly expanding mining company, recognized as the largest multi-commodity mining and metals company in the Middle East. The company is instrumental in advancing the mining industry, aiming to establish it as a key economic pillar for Saudi Arabia through the development of a comprehensive and integrated mining value chain. This full-time role is based in Riyadh.

Role Overview

The Principal Specialist, Data Modeling & Arch (Operational Technology) is responsible for establishing the foundational data modeling and architecture for Operational Technology (OT) and industrial data across various plants, sites, and operational systems. This position is critical for enabling reliable OT analytics by standardizing the representation, governance, and alignment of assets, tags, events, alarms, measurements, production contexts, historians, SCADA/DCS, condition monitoring, and maintenance data with enterprise IT data products.

Key Responsibilities

• Define enterprise OT data modeling standards for time-series data, events, alarms, assets, tags, measurements, and production contexts.
• Establish canonical OT concepts, including asset hierarchy, location hierarchy, tag naming, measurement definitions, and work order linkage.
• Design scalable data schemas for curated OT layers and reusable OT data products, ensuring auditability, lineage, and quality attributes.
• Architect OT-to-IT data alignment patterns to connect operational measurements with enterprise entities for reporting and analytics.
• Align historians, SCADA/DCS, condition monitoring, maintenance, reliability, and production data with enterprise data products.
• Define integration rules for tag mapping, unit standardization, reference data, semantic consistency, and cross-site normalization.
• Embed governance-by-design into OT data models, covering ownership, metadata, lineage, quality rules, and lifecycle controls.
• Define quality attributes for historian data, including compression, interpolation, quality flags, sampling frequency, and streaming patterns.
• Partner with OT engineering, cybersecurity, data platform, and infrastructure teams to design secure and compliant OT data flows.
• Review solution designs, data models, vendor deliverables, and integration approaches to ensure architectural consistency.
• Provide technical leadership on OT semantics, industrial data architecture, data modeling practices, and data product design.
• Coach engineers, data modelers, platform teams, and solution teams on OT modeling standards and implementation practices.

Qualifications and Experience

• A minimum of 10 years of relevant experience in data modeling and architecture, specifically within Operational Technology environments.
• Demonstrated ability to define and implement enterprise OT data modeling standards for various industrial data types.
• Experience in designing scalable data schemas for high-volume industrial data, addressing latency, site variability, and intermittent connectivity.
• Proficiency in architecting OT-to-IT data alignment patterns and defining integration rules for semantic consistency.
• Strong understanding of industrial data governance, quality attributes for historian data, and lifecycle controls.
• Experience collaborating with cybersecurity and engineering teams to ensure secure and compliant OT data architecture.
• Proven technical leadership skills, including coaching and knowledge transfer in industrial data architecture and data product design.

Desired Outcomes

• Consistent adoption of standard OT data models across sites, platforms, and industrial systems.
• Reliable representation of assets, tags, events, alarms, measurements, and production contexts for trusted analytics.
• Effective OT-to-IT integration patterns enabling cross-domain reporting, performance analysis, and data product development.
• Curated OT layers with clear lineage, quality rules, auditability, and governance controls.
• Accelerated site onboarding, tag normalization, unit standardization, and data model reuse through practical reference patterns.

Work Location

This role is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.