About the Role
Maaden, established in 1997, is a rapidly growing global mining company and the largest multi-commodity mining and metals entity in the Middle East. The company is instrumental in developing the mining industry as a key pillar of Saudi Arabia's economy, building an integrated mining value chain. Maaden is offering an opportunity for a Principal Specialist, Data Modeling & Architecture (OT) to contribute to its growth and the future of mining in the Kingdom.
Role Overview
The Principal Specialist, Data Modeling & Architecture (OT) will act as the architectural authority for operational technology (OT) and industrial data modeling. This position is vital for ensuring a unified representation of assets, events, measurements, and production contexts across all plants, sites, and operational systems. By establishing standard models that integrate historians, SCADA/DCS, condition monitoring, and maintenance data with enterprise IT data products, this role will facilitate trusted OT analytics. The position will address OT-specific constraints, including high-volume time-series data, latency requirements, site variability, and intermittent connectivity, through practical modeling patterns, semantic consistency, and governance-by-design in OT-to-IT integration.
Key Responsibilities
- Define OT data modeling standards for time-series, events, alarms, and asset hierarchies to support operational analytics and reliability use cases.
- Establish canonical OT concepts, including asset, tag, measurement, work order linkage, and location hierarchy, ensuring consistent adoption across sites and solutions.
- Architect OT-to-IT data alignment patterns that map operational measurements to enterprise entities for cross-domain reporting and performance analysis.
- Ensure OT models accommodate historian characteristics such as high frequency, compression, interpolation, quality flags, and streaming ingestion patterns.
- Design scalable schemas for curated OT layers and OT data products, incorporating auditability, lineage, and quality attributes.
- Collaborate with OT engineering, cyber/security, and platform teams to ensure secure, segmented, and compliant designs for OT data flows.
- Review OT data solution designs and vendor deliverables, providing design authority to resolve modeling trade-offs and ensure long-term maintainability.
- Define reusable patterns for site onboarding and variability handling, including naming normalization, tag mapping, unit standardization, and reference data.
- Coach engineers and modelers on OT semantics and modeling best practices, and lead design reviews for critical OT initiatives.
Qualifications and Experience
Candidates should possess a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Data Engineering, or a related field. A Master's degree is preferred. Experience in OT/industrial systems is considered an advantage. The role requires 10-15 years of experience in data modeling/architecture, with demonstrated exposure to OT/industrial data landscapes. Experience working with historians, industrial protocols/systems, and integrating OT data into enterprise analytics platforms is essential.
Required Skills and Competencies
- Deep understanding of OT data characteristics, including time-series, events, alarms, quality flags, and asset hierarchies.
- Ability to model and integrate OT and IT data for enterprise analytics and operational performance reporting.
- Knowledge of SCADA/DCS/historians, sensors, and industrial context, with familiarity with reliability/maintenance data linkages.
- Strong governance-by-design mindset, encompassing classification, access control, and auditability for industrial data.
- Proficiency in stakeholder engagement across plant/site operations, OT engineering, IT, and data platform teams.
- Strategic Thinking & Decision Making: Ability to anticipate implications and guide enterprise direction.
- Collaboration & Influencing: Skill in aligning diverse stakeholders without direct authority.
- Execution Excellence: Capability to set high standards and ensure measurable outcomes.
- Innovation & Adaptability: Aptitude for applying modern practices and evolving standards pragmatically.
- Change Leadership: Ability to drive adoption, governance, and continuous improvement.
Work Location and Type
This is a full-time position based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The role requires over 10 years of relevant experience.