---
title: 'Principal Technical Consultant - Operational Technology, Network Security at AHEAD'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-technical-consultant-operational-technology-network-security-ahead-ea93nes7pc03'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-30'
---

# Principal Technical Consultant - Operational Technology, Network Security at AHEAD

- **Company:** AHEAD
- **Location:** United States
- **Compensation:** $180k–$195k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-30
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/thinkahead/585bfa7c-0fc6-4654-b2f9-93238264970d

## Job description

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.

At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.

We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.

What You Will Do: Lead OT assessments and advisory engagements

- Serve as the primary technical lead for OT Assessments, OT strategy work, and SRDP workstreams.
- Plan and facilitate discovery workshops, site visits, technical deep dives, and executive working sessions.
- Establish a safe, non-disruptive discovery approach that respects production schedules, safety requirements, and change control.
- Assess the client environment across assets, networks, control systems, dependencies, ownership, and operational constraints, and evaluate maturity across people, process, and technology.
- Identify risks, gaps, single points of failure, and lifecycle concerns affecting security, reliability, visibility, and resilience.
- Produce current-state and future-state architecture views, findings, maturity assessments, and prioritized roadmaps that connect recommendations to business impact, investment, and sequencing.
- Own the technical quality of deliverables and present findings to engineering teams, plant and operations leaders, and executives.

Apply deep OT and cybersecurity expertise

- Analyze OT and ICS architectures spanning PLCs, HMIs, SCADA, DCS, historians, MES, engineering workstations, safety systems, and connected edge environments.
- Evaluate IT/OT connectivity, Purdue-aligned design, zones and conduits, industrial DMZs, segmentation, remote access, and third-party connectivity.
- Assess asset inventory, passive visibility, communication flows, protocol use, legacy platforms, and compensating controls.
- Evaluate identity and access, endpoint protection, vulnerability and patch management, monitoring, incident response, backup, and recovery practices. • Balance security recommendations against safety, availability, performance, maintenance windows, and long OT lifecycles.
- Apply recognized standards including NIST SP 800-82, ISA/IEC 62443, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, plus applicable regulatory requirements.
- Bring a point of view on secure remote operations, edge computing, industrial wireless and private 5G, cloud-connected OT, and OT data.

Lead technical teams and delivery quality

- Lead and delegate work across technical consultants, engineers, and client resources on one or more workstreams.
- Break complex problems into work packages with clear approach, decision points, and acceptance criteria.
- Coordinate with Project Managers, account teams, and other AHEAD practices to deliver an integrated solution.
- Review technical work for accuracy and clarity, and mentor consultants on architecture, analysis, documentation, and client interaction.
- Contribute to repeatable methods, templates, and reference architectures for the OT practice.

Contribute to business development

- Participate in discovery and qualification meetings as the OT subject matter expert.
- Help shape scopes of work, estimates, work breakdown structures, assumptions, risks, and proposals.
- Support technical solutioning and proposal presentations with senior client stakeholders.
- Develop practical thought leadership, internal enablement, and client briefings that strengthen AHEAD's OT brand.

What You Will Bring: Required Qualifications

- 10 or more years delivering complex technology, cybersecurity, network, or engineering solutions, with significant Operational Technology or ICS experience.
- Demonstrated experience leading OT or ICS assessments, architecture, segmentation, cybersecurity, or modernization engagements.
- Strong understanding of control-system architectures and industrial protocols such as Modbus, DNP3, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, or OPC UA.
- Strong OT networking and security depth, including routing and switching, firewalls, industrial DMZs, segmentation, remote access, identity, and monitoring.
- Ability to explain the operational impact of technical decisions where safety, availability, and production continuity are critical.
- Experience producing architecture diagrams, maturity assessments, prioritized roadmaps, and executive presentations.
- Experience facilitating workshops with stakeholders from the plant floor through executive leadership.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to tailor complex material to the audience.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical teams, delegate, review work, and mentor others.
- Willingness to travel to client sites as engagements require.
- Bachelor's degree in a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with ISA/IEC 62443, NIST SP 800-82, NIST CSF, NERC CIP, FDA, or other industry-specific requirements.
- Background in manufacturing, energy, utilities, water, healthcare, transportation, chemicals, or pharmaceuticals.
- Experience with OT asset discovery and passive monitoring platforms, industrial firewalls, secure remote access, or OT security operations.
- Experience with IT/OT convergence, edge platforms, industrial wireless, private 5G, or OT data platforms.
- Experience developing estimates, work breakdown structures, service briefs, or statements of work.
- Certifications such as GICSP, GRID, CISSP, ISA/IEC 62443, or CCNP/CCIE.

How You Will be Successful: In your first year, you will independently lead OT discovery and assessment work that clients trust, produce client-ready deliverables that move decisions forward, earn credibility with both plant-floor and executive stakeholders, strengthen the delivery team through coaching and review, and contribute reusable OT methods that improve how AHEAD delivers.

Why This Role Matters: OT consulting is not about applying enterprise IT controls unchanged to a plant floor. It takes technical depth, operational humility, and the ability to make progress without losing sight of safety, reliability, or recovery. If you have spent your career understanding how industrial environments work and want to help organizations make them more secure and resilient, this role puts that experience in front of the clients who need it.

The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On-Target Earnings (“OTE”) for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount. This OTE range may vary based on the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and geographic location.

Why AHEAD:

Through our daily work and internal groups like Moving Women AHEAD and RISE AHEAD, we value and benefit from diversity of people, ideas, experience, and everything in between.

We fuel growth by stacking our office with top-notch technologies in a multi-million-dollar lab, by encouraging cross department training and development, sponsoring certifications and credentials for continued learning.

USA Employment Benefits include:

- Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- 401(k)
- Paid company holidays
- Paid time off
- Paid parental and caregiver leave
- Plus more! See benefits https://www.aheadbenefits.com/ for additional details.

Use of AI: We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, assessing responses, or to capture recordings and create transcriptions or summaries during interviews. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans.

If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please refer to the Candidate Privacy Notice or contact us at privacy@ahead.com.

You may opt-out of the review or analysis of your application and resume by AI tools by using the General Application. Please include the role you wish to apply for in the Additional Information field. You may also choose to opt-out of recording and transcription at any time, including after joining an interview.  Candidates will not be penalized for choosing to opt-out.

## About AHEAD

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: AHEAD is an engineering-led digital platform company that accelerates enterprise strategy into execution across AI, cloud, data, security, and infrastructure.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped/PE-backed; no public funding rounds disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, USA
- **Founded**: 2007
- **Founders**: Dan Adamany (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: IT Services & Consulting, Digital Transformation, Managed Services
- **Target customers**: Fortune 1000 enterprises, large-scale organizations with complex, multi-domain IT estates (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To accelerate strategy into execution, engineering integrated solutions across infrastructure, applications, data, and security — building what others only blueprint.

## Products & Services
- **AI Transformation**: A unified AI fabric to accelerate AI from idea to business value, including AI-enabled infrastructure and data readiness. *(Service)*
- **AI Enabled Infrastructure**: Scalable, resilient architectures supporting high-performance workloads from core to edge. *(Service)*
- **Data Platform Modernization**: Governed data platforms that turn raw data into trustworthy insight and AI readiness. *(Service)*
- **Secure and Resilient Architectures**: Platforms designed to reduce risk, limit impact, and recover quickly. *(Service)*
- **Platform and Workload Modernization**: Modernizing platforms and optimizing workloads across cloud, data center, and edge. *(Service)*
- **Operational Excellence**: Frictionless operations, predictable performance, and optimized spend. *(Service)*
- **Managed Services**: Ongoing management of critical systems over their entire lifecycle. *(Service)*
- **Proprietary IP (Foundry™, Hatch™)**: Accelerators, financial models, scorecards, integration-ready code, and policy-as-code. *(Software/Tooling)*
- **400+ APIs & Custom Offerings**: Frameworks that integrate multiple platforms for automation, data sandboxes, and ML/AI exploration. *(Platform)*

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (Private company)
- **Key Metric**: **Gross Revenue** of **$3.7 billion** (as of 2024, following the acquisition of CDI); **2,500+ employees** across 40 locations globally.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Partners with **200+ technology providers** (e.g., major cloud, data center, security, and automation vendors). The company is backed by private equity (likely a growth/PE structure, though specific investors are not named in the provided materials).
- **Growth Signals**: Scaled from a Midwest focus to national and international coverage through **12 acquisitions since 2019**; expanded service portfolio into data, app dev, custom manufacturing, and global logistics via M&A; recent acquisition of CDI (New York-based) added significant scale.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Orchestration Expertise**: Ability to stitch together complex, multi-vendor systems into cohesive, scalable architectures — a differentiator in an increasingly fragmented IT landscape.
- **Full-Stack Engineering**: Deep expertise across AI, cloud, data, security, infrastructure, and operations, applied in an integrated fashion.
- **Unified Delivery Model**: One team, one roadmap, one owner held accountable for driving outcomes, from strategy through implementation and ongoing operations.
- **Consultative Approach**: Engages early to architect transformation roadmaps, not just as a reseller of hardware/software.
- **Proprietary IP (Foundry™, Hatch™)**: Unique accelerators and code libraries that de-risk and speed up client digital initiatives.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Accelerating enterprise AI adoption; expanding managed services; deepening capabilities in data, security, and cloud; continuing M&A strategy to add geographic coverage and new service lines.
- **Direction for growth**: Becoming the go-to strategic partner for Fortune 1000 leaders navigating the complexity of modern IT, with a focus on accountability from design to operations.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: Engineering-led organization with a strong emphasis on technical depth, ownership, and accountability. Described as a "game-changer in tech" that values innovation and execution.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Likely hybrid/office-based given the nature of client-facing consulting and infrastructure work; 40 global locations suggest flexibility in location.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies across AI, cloud, security, and data at massive scale; exposure to Fortune 1000 clients and complex transformations; strong focus on IP development and engineering excellence; clear growth trajectory through acquisitions and expansion.

## Sources
1. [AHEAD Official Website](https://www.ahead.com/)
2. [AHEAD Story Page](https://www.ahead.com/story/)
3. [AHEAD Leadership Page](https://www.ahead.com/leadership/)
4. [AHEAD Careers Page](https://jobs.lever.co/thinkahead)

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