OT Network Engineer / Industrial IoT Connectivity Architect (Consultant/Advisor)

An innovative Ag-tech/Food-tech startup is looking for OT Network Engineer / Industrial IoT Connectivity Architect (Consultant/Advisor).

We operate an automated farm in Israel with ~30 operational systems today and a planned scale-up to ~240 systems. Each system includes a PLC-controlled critical component (blower) and additional actuators (valves/pumps/LEDs) plus sensors. We use an on-prem edge/proxy service (FastAPI) that connects the farm to a cloud backend on AWS for monitoring, orchestration, and data (UI, workers, DB).

Main challenge:

Define and design a reliable OT connectivity and edge/cloud architecture that supports stable operations despite network issues. Most current incidents are related to cloud reachability (WAN/backhaul) rather than local control. The farm LAN is currently Wi-Fi-based (Ethernet to every system is not feasible). Cellular reception on site is good, so redundancy via cellular may be part of the solution.

What we need the consultant to do (scope):

Assess current connectivity and propose a measurement plan to distinguish root causes:

• LAN/OT (Wi-Fi coverage/congestion/AP limitations, DHCP/DNS/local routing)
• WAN/backhaul (ISP stability, routing, DNS, failover)
• Cloud service availability patterns

Define requirements for reliability/availability and recovery (including RTO), with a clear separation between:

• Safety/critical local control (must remain local and independent of cloud)
• Cloud supervision/orchestration (should degrade gracefully)

Propose a target architecture for both:

• Current farm (~30 systems): practical, minimal-change improvements
• Future farm (~240 systems): scalable network topology, zoning, failure domains, and edge scaling

Recommend solutions for:

• Wi-Fi OT network design approach (AP strategy, channel planning, segmentation/VLANs)
• WAN resiliency (e.g., dual-WAN ISP + cellular failover, VPN/tunnel approach)
• Edge behavior (buffering/store-and-forward, command queueing, reconnection behavior)
• Monitoring & alerting (actionable fault classification: LAN vs WAN vs proxy vs cloud)

Provide acceptance tests and an operational runbook: outage simulations, failover tests, reconnection tests, and measurable pass/fail criteria.

Important operational requirements / constraints (high level):

• Blower is PLC-owned and must not depend on cloud connectivity.
• During blackout: blower may be down up to 15 minutes (UPS bridging until generator).
• During communications loss (LAN or WAN): it is acceptable that some noncritical actions pause, but connectivity should restore within ~1 hour and the system should have defined offline behavior.
• There is also a coordination use-case: MPU mobile units visit BGUs, and docking triggers a joint process requiring valve actions on both sides. We expect real-time coordination to be on-prem/edge, with the cloud handling high-level scheduling and audit.