SCADA Manager

Job Title: SCADA Manager

Team: Critical Technologies- Engineering

Reports To: Senior Engineering Manager

Office Location: Charlotte, NC

Travel Requirement: Yes, up to 30%

Company Vehicle Operations Requirement: Not required

Safety Training Requirement: Site Safety trained and HSI enrollment

Work Hours: Monday-Friday 8am-5pm

Remote Work: Non-remote unless otherwise determined by management.

Job Description

The SCADA Manager is a people leader first, accountable for building, developing, retaining, and leading a high-performing SCADA team. The role owns team performance, capability growth, staffing, and delivery outcomes for the SCADA function.

This is a strategic leadership position rather than a hands-on individual-contributor or tactical project-execution role. The SCADA Manager has sufficient SCADA, OT, controls, and business understanding to evaluate technical direction, ask effective questions, assess risk and tradeoffs, and guide the team toward the capabilities and outcomes the business requires. The SCADA Manager is not expected to be the primary designer, programmer, troubleshooter, or technical “do-er.” Instead, the SCADA Manager enables technical experts to perform at a high level, removes organizational barriers, establishes clarity and accountability, and drives the function forward.

The SCADA Manager improves performance, delivery, and business results across the SCADA function. The SCADA Manager operates with limited oversight, balances competing priorities, makes team and cross-functional business decisions, and aligns stakeholders around priorities, decisions, and tradeoffs.

Responsibilities include but not limited to:

People Leadership and Talent Management

• Own hiring plans, candidate selection, onboarding, retention, performance management, succession planning, and workforce capability for the SCADA team.
• Build and sustain a high-performing, accountable, collaborative, and inclusive team culture.
• Establish clear role expectations, individual goals, development plans, and measurable performance standards for direct reports.
• Conduct regular one-on-ones, coaching, feedback, performance reviews, and career-development discussions.
• Recognize strong performance promptly and address performance gaps directly, consistently, and constructively.
• Hold team members accountable for commitments, quality, communication, technical ownership, professional conduct, and results.
• Assess team capacity, skills, and organizational gaps; develop existing talent and recruit strategically to meet future business needs.
• Delegate authority appropriately, empower technical leads and engineers, and maintain clear accountability for outcomes.

Strategic Leadership and Technical Direction

• Define, communicate, and execute the SCADA team’s annual goals, capability roadmap, and performance measures in alignment with department and business objectives.
• Drive the function toward the future state the organization needs, including scalable delivery practices, technical capability, talent depth, process maturity, and appropriate adoption of emerging SCADA and OT technologies.
• Translate business objectives, customer needs, operational risk, and organizational strategy into clear direction for the SCADA team.
• Establish an operating cadence for team planning, workload review, delivery performance, issue escalation, resource allocation, and continuous improvement.
• Balance near-term delivery demands with long-term capability building, process improvement, training, succession, and organizational health.
• Identify opportunities to improve team performance, predictability, quality, cost effectiveness, and business outcomes across the full SCADA function.

Resource and Business Management

• Lead team-level resource planning, workload balancing, prioritization, utilization, and staffing decisions across the SCADA function in conjunction with other Engineering Teams, and Operations Management.
• Maintain visibility into SCADA Team health, budget, quality, risk, dependencies, commitments, and resource constraints.
• Assist in resolving conflicts among competing project, customer, operational, and people needs.
• Establish clear ownership, escalation paths, and decision rights for the team’s work.
• Hold the team accountable for reliable delivery, timely communication, appropriate risk escalation, and follow-through on commitments.
• Review performance data and key performance indicators; use results to identify trends, correct problems, improve execution, and report progress to leadership.
• Support the business case, planning, and prioritization for tools, staffing, training, process improvements, and technology investments affecting the SCADA function.

Technical and Operational Ownership

• Maintain sufficient understanding of SCADA, industrial controls, OT environments, system integration, cybersecurity, commissioning, and delivery practices to provide credible leadership and informed oversight.
• Understand how the team performs its work well enough to evaluate approach, risk, capacity, quality, dependencies, and customer impact without functioning as the primary technical executor.
• Partner with technical leads, project management, and other stakeholders to align team execution with technical standards, and business requirements.
• Sponsor and govern the development, adoption, and continuous improvement of SCADA and OT standards, engineering processes, and quality practices.
• Ensure the team incorporates applicable cybersecurity, safety, regulatory, quality, and customer requirements into its work.
• Establish mechanisms for technical review, lessons learned, incident learning, knowledge sharing, and disciplined adoption of new tools and technologies.
• Evaluate emerging technologies through the lens of business value, risk, scalability, maintainability, and organizational readiness.

Business-Savy and Communication

• Communicate clearly, early, and candidly with leadership, direct reports, project teams, clients, and partner organizations.
• Align multiple stakeholders around priorities, decisions, commitments, tradeoffs, risks, and required actions.
• Represent the SCADA function in cross-functional planning, portfolio discussions, customer conversations, and leadership forums.
• Escalate risks, decisions, dependencies, and performance concerns with appropriate context, recommendations, and ownership.
• Build trusted working relationships across engineering, operations, customers, and leadership.