Principal Specialist Data Modeling & Arch (Operational Technology)📣 Job Ad

About Ma'aden and the Role

Ma'aden, established in 1997, is recognized as one of the fastest-growing mining companies globally and the largest multi-commodity mining and metals company in the Middle East. The company plays a key role in developing the mining industry to become the third pillar of Saudi Arabia’s economy. We are seeking a Principal Specialist, Data Modeling & Arch (Operational Technology) to join our team in Riyadh on a full-time basis.

Role Purpose

This role is responsible for establishing the foundational data modeling and architecture for Operational Technology (OT) and industrial data across Ma'aden's plants, sites, and operational systems. The Principal Specialist will enable trusted OT analytics by standardizing the representation, governance, and alignment of critical operational data with enterprise IT data products.

Key Responsibilities: OT Data Architecture & Modeling

• 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 with auditability, lineage, and quality attributes.
• Ensure modeling patterns address high-volume industrial data, latency requirements, site variability, and intermittent connectivity.

Key Responsibilities: Data Integration & Governance

• Architect OT-to-IT data alignment patterns that 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, including ownership, metadata, lineage, quality rules, and lifecycle controls.
• Define quality attributes for historian data, including compression, interpolation, quality flags, sampling frequency, and streaming patterns.
• Establish reusable governance patterns for site onboarding, data standardization, naming conventions, and master/reference data alignment.

Technical Leadership & Compliance

• Partner with OT engineering, cybersecurity, data platform, and infrastructure teams to design secure and compliant OT data flows.
• Ensure OT data architecture respects segmentation, access control, operational resilience, and industrial cybersecurity requirements.
• Review solution designs, data models, vendor deliverables, and integration approaches to ensure architectural consistency.
• Resolve modeling trade-offs and guide design decisions to support long-term scalability, maintainability, and operational reliability.
• 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.
• Lead design reviews for critical OT data initiatives and build knowledge assets, standards, templates, and reference patterns.

Candidate Profile and Desired Impact

The ideal candidate will possess over 10 years of relevant experience in data modeling and architecture, with a strong focus on Operational Technology environments. Success in this role involves the consistent definition and adoption of standard OT data models across sites, platforms, and industrial systems. This will ensure assets, tags, events, alarms, measurements, and production contexts are represented consistently for trusted analytics. The role's impact will be seen in reliable cross-domain reporting, performance analysis, and data product development enabled by effective OT-to-IT integration patterns, and through curated OT layers that include clear lineage, quality rules, auditability, and governance controls.