OT Specialist

OT Specialist – 6-Month Contract (Inside IR35)

Location: Remote - With Some Occasional International Travel

Duration: 6 months

Start Date: ASAP

Overview

Help strengthen the resilience and reliability of critical OT environments across a major transformation initiative. We’re looking for an OT Operational Resilience Specialist who understands how industrial operations actually run; someone who can bridge engineering, operations, and governance to uplift OT environments. If you excel at bringing structure, clarity, and resilience to complex OT estates, this role will suit you perfectly.

Key Responsibilities

• Guiding senior stakeholders on operational risks, investment focus, and the overall progress of the OT uplift programme.
• Leading workshops and knowledge-sharing activities to help engineering, operations, IT, and cyber teams build stronger OT awareness and capability.
• Supporting the evolution of OT governance; strengthening processes around change control, configuration management, incident response, and system lifecycle routines.
• Reviewing integrator and supplier deliverables, ensuring proposed designs and engineering work meet required standards and operational expectations.
• Helping shape the future-state OT environment by contributing to architectural principles, governance models, and control frameworks (including alignment with recognised standards such as IEC 62443).
• Working closely with operational teams to prioritise improvements across high-risk sites, ensuring remediation work is targeted, coordinated, and realistic for live environments.
• Taking a practical look at existing OT estates to understand where resilience, visibility, operational processes, and system design need strengthening.
• Supporting the creation and uplift of OT standards, reference architectures, and guidance documents that improve consistency across the estate.
• Helping build a clear, practical OT transformation roadmap that balances business risk, operational constraints, and long-term resilience goals.
• Strengthening foundational OT controls; such as asset inventories, backup and recovery routines, segmentation practices, monitoring capability, and vulnerability management processes.
• Contributing to maturity assessments, risk reviews, and ongoing assurance activities to track capability uplift over time.
• Providing oversight across technical uplift activities, including enhancements to monitoring, network improvements, remote access models, and backup strategies.
• Reviewing OT system designs, remote access approaches, and segmentation models to ensure they align with agreed design principles.
• Supporting the development of hardening expectations for key OT components such as PLCs, HMIs, historians, SCADA servers, and field devices; ensuring operational practicality remains front and centre.

Key Skills and Experience

• Strong background working in OT/ICS environments such as utilities, industrial operations, manufacturing, or critical infrastructure.
• Proven experience improving OT operations, resilience, and governance — not just technology.
• Understanding of how IT and OT environments intersect and the practical risks that come with convergence.
• Experience supporting uplift or transformation activity in live operational environments.
• Solid grasp of OT risk management, resilience principles, and operational best practice.
• Familiarity with industrial control systems, common OT components, and operational protocols (e.g. Modbus, OPC-UA, DNP3).
• Experience collaborating with engineering teams, OEMs, integrators, and third-party suppliers.
• Working knowledge of IEC 62443 is beneficial, but practical operational experience is valued more.