Principal Specialist, Exploration & PDE Data Domain

Role Overview

Principal Specialist, Exploration & PDE Data Domain at Ma'aden. This is a senior technical leadership position responsible for designing and evolving the enterprise data architecture across operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) environments.

Role Purpose

Lead the design, modeling, and evolution of Ma'aden's enterprise data architecture across both OT and IT environments. Ensure that data products, enterprise data layers, and integration patterns are standardized, scalable, high-quality, and governed. Provide 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. Serve as a senior technical authority responsible for defining modeling standards, shaping architecture decisions, and guiding multidisciplinary teams to ensure cohesion, performance, and semantic consistency across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

Data Modeling & Architecture Design

• Develop conceptual, logical, and physical data models aligned with business domains, following enterprise standards and modeling principles defined in Ma'aden's architecture frameworks.
• Lead the creation and optimization of data product models, enterprise layer schemas, and domain-driven structures for both OT and IT sources.
• Ensure 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 and manufacturing sites, and the differing data ingestion, latency, and operational constraints.
• Design data flows from edge to cloud, including ingestion, storage, curation, and consumption layers.

Integration & Governance

• Establish integration patterns ensuring 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.

Team Leadership & Development

• Mentor data modelers, engineers, and analysts to uplift enterprise modeling maturity.
• Facilitate cross-domain and cross-platform collaboration across multidisciplinary teams.

Qualifications & Experience

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• Master's degree preferred in Data Architecture, Software Engineering, or AI/Analytics.

Experience

• 10–15 years of experience in data modeling, data architecture, or enterprise information architecture.
• Demonstrated experience designing models and architectures across both OT and IT landscapes.
• Strong experience with cloud-native platforms (Azure preferred), modern data platforms, and metadata tools such as Informatica.

Skills & Competencies

Technical Skills

• Mastery of conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling.
• Expertise in data architecture frameworks, enterprise modeling principles, and metadata management.
• Understanding of OT systems including SCADA, DCS, historians, and sensors, and IT data platforms.
• Knowledge of modeling tools such as Erwin, ER/Studio, and Sparx EA.
• Proficiency with lineage and governance tooling.

Competencies

• Solution and domain architecture design.
• Systems integration and interoperability.
• Translation of business needs into architecture.
• Cross-domain and cross-platform collaboration.
• Strong design governance and guidance.