Principal Specialist Exploration & PDE Data Domain📣 Job Ad

About Ma'aden and the Opportunity

Ma'aden, established in 1997, is one of the fastest-growing mining companies globally and the largest multi-commodity mining and metals company in the Middle East. The company is leading the development of the mining industry to become the third pillar of Saudi Arabia’s economy by building a world-class, fully integrated mining value chain. This full-time position for a Principal Specialist, Exploration & PDE Data Domain, based in Riyadh, offers an opportunity to contribute to this growth and play a key part in shaping the future of mining in the Kingdom.

Role Overview

The Principal Specialist, Exploration & PDE Data Domain, is responsible for leading the design, modeling, and evolution of Ma'aden’s enterprise data architecture across both Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) environments. This role ensures that data products, enterprise data layers, and integration patterns are standardized, scalable, high-quality, and governed. It provides expert guidance on how diverse OT and IT data flows should be modeled, aligned, and transformed to support analytics, operations, AI/ML, and enterprise systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop conceptual, logical, and physical data models aligned with business domains, adhering to enterprise standards and modeling principles.
• Lead the creation and optimization of data product models, enterprise layer schemas, and domain-driven structures for both OT and IT sources.
• Ensure data models consider technology-specific requirements, including relational, non-relational, time-series, and streaming architectures.
• Architect unified modeling approaches that address the complexities of OT environments, such as remote, disconnected, and heterogeneous mining/manufacturing sites, along with differing data ingestion, latency, and operational constraints.
• Establish integration patterns to ensure consistent transformation logic, metadata, lineage, and data quality across OT–IT boundaries.
• Define and maintain enterprise modeling standards, guidelines, and reusable templates to ensure consistency across the organization.
• Review and approve modeling deliverables from internal teams and external vendors.
• Mentor data modelers, engineers, and analysts to enhance enterprise modeling maturity.

Required Experience and Expertise

This senior technical authority role requires over 10 years of experience in enterprise data architecture and data modeling. The successful candidate will be responsible for defining modeling standards, shaping architecture decisions, and guiding multidisciplinary teams to ensure cohesion, performance, and semantic consistency across the organization. Expertise in data governance, scalability, and quality within complex OT and IT landscapes is essential.

Technical Scope and Challenges

The position involves navigating the complexities of integrating diverse data flows from both OT and IT environments. This includes working with various technology-specific requirements such as relational, non-relational, time-series, and streaming architectures. A key aspect is architecting unified modeling approaches for challenging OT environments, which may involve remote, disconnected, and heterogeneous mining and manufacturing sites with unique data ingestion, latency, and operational constraints.

Professional Development and Contribution

Beyond direct architectural responsibilities, this role involves a significant contribution to organizational capability building. The Principal Specialist will mentor data modelers, engineers, and analysts, playing a crucial part in uplifting the overall enterprise modeling maturity within Ma'aden. This position is central to ensuring robust and consistent data management practices across the company.