Principal Specialist, Corporate Functions Data Domain

Role Overview

Principal Specialist, Corporate Functions Data Domain at Ma'aden. This is a senior technical role responsible for designing, developing, and optimizing scalable data engineering solutions across both Operational Technology (OT) and IT environments.

Role Purpose

Design, develop, and optimize data engineering solutions that ensure data products, enterprise data layers, pipelines, and integration flows are consistent, governed, high-performing, and aligned with enterprise architecture. Operate as a senior technical specialist providing guidance across multidisciplinary engineering teams and ensuring cohesive OT–IT data ingestion, transformation, and consumption patterns.

Key Responsibilities

Pipeline Design & Development

• Design, build, and optimize ingestion, transformation, and orchestration pipelines across OT and IT data sources.
• Implement scalable ELT/ETL workflows supporting enterprise analytics, data products, AI/ML, and operational use cases.
• Engineer unified data flows across remote mining sites, disconnected OT environments, manufacturing systems, edge computing devices, and IT cloud platforms.

Data Governance & Quality

• Embed metadata capture, lineage tracking, and quality checks into data pipelines to support data governance and cataloging requirements.

Technical Architecture

• Translate architectural models into physical engineering implementations.
• Address OT-specific latency, connectivity, protocol variability, and historian/SCADA integration considerations in pipeline designs.

Stakeholder Engagement & Leadership

• Partner with business domains to understand data requirements and ensure delivered pipelines meet operational and analytical needs.
• Guide engineering teams and junior specialists through technical leadership.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• Master's degree preferred in Data Architecture, Software Engineering, or AI/Analytics.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering across modern architectures (cloud, data lake and warehouse, OT/IT).
• Strong experience building data pipelines integrating OT systems (SCADA, DCS, historians) and IT data sources, including ERP Fusion.
• Practical experience with Azure, modern data lakehouse patterns, virtualization, and workflow orchestration.
• Exposure to DevOps pipelines, containerization, data quality, and metadata management systems.

Skills & Competencies

• Advanced ELT/ETL development using Data Factory, Informatica, and custom pipelines.
• Strong programming in Python, SQL, and data transformation frameworks.
• Experience with timeseries, historian, and sensor data coming from OT.
• Deep understanding of streaming pipelines, micro-batching, and realtime architectures.
• Strong knowledge of cloud platforms (Azure preferred), data lakehouse, Delta/Parquet formats, API integration, and orchestration tools.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices, CI/CD, and Git-based workflows.
• Execution Excellence: Delivers high-quality pipelines and engineering solutions with strong reliability.
• Collaboration & Influence: Works effectively across OT, IT, and business domains.
• Problem Solving: Tackles complex integration challenges across industrial and corporate environments.
• Adaptability & Innovation: Applies modern engineering techniques and identifies improvements in architecture and tooling.
• Technical Leadership: Guides engineering teams and junior specialists.