Factory Data Architect - IT

To support our extraordinary teams who build great products and contribute to our growth, we’re looking to add a Factory Information Architect - IT in Chennai, India.

This role will lead the definition and governance of the Factory Information Architecture for the Flex Future Factory ecosystem. The position will define how physical factory structures, logical business structures, and manufacturing information are represented, related, contextualized, and governed across manufacturing systems, analytics, Digital Twins, and AI-enabled solutions.

The role will work jointly with Factory Integration and Automation teams, which contribute technical naming, payload, connectivity, and implementation standards. The Factory Information Architect will ensure that the required enterprise capabilities, governance mechanisms, and technology solutions exist to catalog, manage, contextualize, validate, and monitor these standards at scale. The role must understand the relevant technologies sufficiently to define practical requirements and guide delivery teams, but is not expected to build pipelines or platforms directly.

Reports to Director and the role involves,

Define and maintain the Future Factory Information Architecture strategy, standards, governance model, and roadmap.

Define and govern the Physical Location Structure for factories, buildings, areas, production lines, cells, stations, equipment, and assets.

Define and govern the Logical Factory Structure for business units, customers, programs, manufacturing entity or site codes, business units, customers and other core business entities.

Establish common information models, identifiers, hierarchies, metadata, business definitions, and semantic relationships across physical and logical structures.

Define requirements for data catalogs, business glossaries, metadata repositories, schema registries, and related capabilities needed to manage manufacturing information standards.

Partner with Enterprise IT, Factory Integration and Automation teams on naming conventions, payload structures, attribute standards, data contracts, and controlled vocabularies, while ensuring enterprise alignment and governance.

Define how manufacturing information must be mapped, transformed, validated, enriched, and contextualized as it moves across factory and enterprise platforms.

Establish schema governance and validation requirements, including versioning, compatibility, mandatory attributes, quality rules, semantic conformance, exception handling, and monitoring.

Govern Unified Namespace information structures, contextual models, ownership principles, and alignment with approved schemas and information standards.

Define the information foundations required for Digital Twin, Knowledge Graph, analytics, and AI capabilities.

Lead architecture reviews and governance forums, monitor adoption and conformance, and work with technical teams to ensure consistent implementation.

Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Architecture, Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or a related discipline.

Experience: Typically 10+ years in information, data, enterprise, solution, or manufacturing systems architecture, including complex global or multi-site initiatives.

Strong experience with information modeling, metadata management, business and asset hierarchies, semantic standards, master and reference data, data catalogs, and governance frameworks.

Experience defining schema governance, validation rules, data contracts, transformation requirements, information quality controls, and conformance processes.

Good understanding of MES, ERP, SCADA, OT systems, equipment connectivity, quality, maintenance, inventory, engineering, and manufacturing operations.

Working knowledge of MQTT, event streaming, APIs, integration services, ETL/ELT, schema registries, cloud data platforms, Knowledge Graphs, Digital Twins, and semantic technologies sufficient to evaluate options and guide implementation teams.

Strong stakeholder management, communication, facilitation, and decision-making skills, with the ability to influence global cross-functional teams.

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