Director Of OT Engineering

Director of OT EngineeringLocation: Spartanburg County, SCType: Direct HireThe PositionOur 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 ResponsibilitiesOT 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.
• Bachelor’s 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.