Director of OT Engineering

Director of OT Engineering
Location: Spartanburg County SC
Type: Direct Hire

The Position

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 ICS and critical infrastructure environments.

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.

Key Responsibilities

OT Infrastructure Strategy & Architecture

• 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.

Leadership & Team Development

• 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.

Identity & Access Management

• Own Active Directory architecture administration and governance across OT environments.
• Lead hybrid identity strategy spanning Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID.
• 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.

Compute Virtualization & Platform Engineering

• 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.

Storage Backup & Recovery

• 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.

Security Infrastructure

• 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 CyberArk BeyondTrust FortiPAM or equivalent solutions.
• Ensure infrastructure configurations align with IEC 62443 NIST SP 800-82 CIS Benchmarks and internal security standards.

Operational Excellence & Governance

• 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.

Vendor Budget & Executive Leadership

• Manage strategic vendor relationships licensing support agreements procurement and technical service providers.
• Own or contribute to OT engineering budgets forecasting capital planning and technology investment decisions.
• Lead vendor evaluations contract negotiations and platform selection initiatives.
• Provide executive-level reporting on infrastructure health availability capacity risk roadmap progress and major engineering initiatives.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives involving OT engineering cybersecurity networking operations facilities and other technical teams.

Required Qualifications

• 15 years of infrastructure engineering experience including 8 years supporting OT ICS industrial or other critical infrastructure environments.
• Significant leadership experience managing senior infrastructure systems or platform engineering teams.
• Expert-level experience designing and governing Microsoft Active Directory within complex enterprise or OT environments.
• Deep experience with hybrid identity platforms including Microsoft Entra ID Conditional Access Entra Connect and privileged identity management.
• Strong experience designing and supporting OT security infrastructure including next-generation firewalls NAC and IPS technologies.
• Advanced experience with VMware vSphere/ESXi Proxmox VE or comparable enterprise virtualization technologies.
• Strong knowledge of enterprise storage technologies including SAN NAS Ceph backup replication and disaster recovery platforms.
• Production experience supporting Kubernetes or containerized infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of OT/ICS architecture segmentation industrial environments and operational availability requirements.
• Working knowledge of IEC 62443 NIST SP 800-82 CIS Benchmarks and related cybersecurity standards.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex infrastructure programs involving multiple technical and operational teams.
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Information Technology Electrical Engineering or a related discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with PAM platforms such as CyberArk BeyondTrust FortiPAM or equivalent.
• Experience with Palo Alto Fortinet or similar enterprise security platforms.
• Familiarity with OpenStack or other private cloud technologies.
• Hands-on experience with Prometheus Grafana Elastic or related observability platforms.
• Director-level budget ownership procurement and vendor negotiation experience.
• Experience operating within NERC CIP IEC 62443 or similarly regulated critical infrastructure environments.
• Certifications such as VCP CKA CISSP Microsoft infrastructure certifications or equivalent.