Plant Network Engineering - Principal Lead

This positon requires international travel.

·        Provide technical leadership, coaching, and development for plant-based OT network engineers, with an emphasis on both technical growth and strong communication skills.

·        Integrate plant network engineering services across sites into a single, standardized service, aligning support models, processes, and service levels.

·        Support cross-plant technical decisions and OT network standards, implementation practices, and documentation with Network Leaders; technical decisions within a plant remain with the plant OT Network Engineer.

·        Provide technical advice and escalation support to plant engineers on complex issues, designs, and changes.

·        Provide decision support to the Network Leaders on priorities, risks, resourcing, and technical direction.

·        Manage the performance of plant network engineering services, including KPIs, regular performance reports, team capacity and workload, and backlog.

·        Hold regular status meetings with each plant OT Network engineer and drive continuous improvement of support quality.

·        Provide on-site backup support at plants during critical cutovers and network incidents when assigned OT Network Engineers are unavailable.

·        Define and improve standard procedures for major outage response, maintenance windows, cutovers, and operational readiness.

·        Act as the first point of customer communication for multi-plant or major network incidents as required; lead post-incident reviews and ensure lessons learned are applied to future work.

·        Build and maintain effective relationships with site stakeholders at plants.

·        Act as a bridge between engineering teams and business partners to keep teams focused on project delivery and operational priorities.

·        Partner with stakeholders to translate business and production requirements into practical network designs and solutions.

·        Oversee and prioritize project delivery and production support across plants.

·        Participate in the hiring and onboarding of plant OT network engineers and support their development plans and certification goals.

·        Develop and maintain knowledge of customer-specific network technologies, site requirements, and operating procedures.

Required Qualifications

·        Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, or related field; and/or commensurate work experience

·        10+ years of progressive network engineering experience.

·        5+ years of experience leading technical teams, including senior engineers.

·        Experience supporting OT, industrial, or manufacturing network environments.

·        Familiarity with OT cybersecurity, IDMZ, and segmentation strategies.

·        Strong expertise in enterprise networking and secure network design.

·        Experience managing network services across multiple sites, including KPIs and service reporting.

·        Proven ability to collaborate across IT, OT, and manufacturing teams.

·        Experience troubleshooting complex issues in high-availability environments.

·        Experience communicating incident status and business impact to customer leadership.

·        Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences.

·        Experience supporting deployments, maintenance windows, and cutovers.

·        Demonstrated ability to mentor others and drive accountability.