IT/OT Engineering Specialist

Job description

Work Schedule Standard (Mon-Fri) Environmental Conditions Adherence to all Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) Safety Standards, Laboratory Setting, Office, Some degree of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) required (safety glasses, gowning, gloves, lab coat, ear plugs etc.) Job Description As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer. DESCRIPTION: As a Pharma Services Group IT/OT Engineering Specialist, you will support the Whitby facility by coordinating local execution, shared IT services, vendors, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, compliant, and reliable technology services for regulated manufacturing and QC laboratory operations. This role requires practical problem-solving within a shared-services environment, including support for inherited systems where documentation or direct administrative access may be limited. Key responsibilities include: • Act as the primary on-site IT/OT contact for Manufacturing, QC, Engineering and Automation, Quality, vendors, and shared IT teams. • Lead evidence-based troubleshooting for manufacturing and laboratory systems, isolate issues and system dependencies, document findings, engage the appropriate resolver teams, and drive issues through testing and resolution. • Gather business and vendor requirements, identify specification gaps, and translate them into technical requirements for servers, storage, virtualization, networks, VLANs, firewall flows, identity and access, backup, monitoring, and recovery. • Coordinate delivery across shared IT services, business functional areas, and vendors. • Support regulated system implementations, technical assessments, architecture and security reviews, validation activities, operational turnover, and post-go-live stabilization. • Create and maintain system inventories, data-flow diagrams, architecture diagrams, firewall and interface requirements, support runbooks, knowledge articles, and CMDB records. • Support segmentation and security-zoning initiatives using ISA-95 and Purdue-model principles, including controlled communication between enterprise, manufacturing, supervisory, control, and device layers. • Support secure industrial data connectivity between PLCs, HMIs, SCADA, historians, MES, laboratory systems, gateways, and enterprise platforms, including OPC UA, tags and namespaces, certificates and endpoint trust, authentication, secure cross-zone data flows, testing, and monitoring. • Support regulated laboratory environments, including chromatography systems, acquisition workstations, application servers, instrument connectivity, directory integration, role-based access, and vendor coordination. • Coordinate patching, firmware updates, infrastructure lifecycle work, and planned outages using risk-based planning, validation requirements, testing, and stakeholder approval. • Maintain disciplined ServiceNow, change-control, and GxP documentation practices. • Monitor operational risks including storage capacity, backup status, retention, recovery readiness, system availability, and clarity of support ownership. REQUIREMENTS: • Minimum five years of relevant experience in IT infrastructure or IT/OT support in a regulated manufacturing or laboratory environment. • College diploma or university degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field. Equivalent education, training, and relevant experience may be considered. • Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot across device, operating-system, application, network, infrastructure, security, and vendor-support boundaries when documentation or direct administrative access is limited, including defining and testing sources, destinations, ports, protocols, authentication, certificates, and system dependencies. • Practical knowledge of Windows administration, Active Directory, VMware, networking, VLANs, DNS, DHCP, firewall requirements, backup, storage, monitoring, and recovery. • Experience gathering business and vendor requirements and converting them into diagrams, infrastructure specifications, actionable technical requests, test plans, and support documentation. • Practical understanding of ISA-95 or Purdue-model concepts, segmentation, DMZs, security zones, trust boundaries, and controlled communication between OT and enterprise systems. • Experience supporting or coordinating laboratory and manufacturing systems such as LIMS, chromatography systems, SCADA, HMI, historians, MES, and instrument-connectivity platforms, including working knowledge of OPC UA, server and gateway architectures, tags and namespaces, certificates, endpoint trust, secure data flows, testing, and monitoring. • Working knowledge of GxP and GMP expectations, validation support, audit readiness, data integrity, documentation discipline, and risk-based change management. • Strong documentation skills, including incident notes, technical requirements, diagrams, runbooks, knowledge articles, and asset or CMDB records. • Strong planning, prioritization, stakeholder communication, ownership, and shared-services coordination skills, with the ability to manage concurrent operational and project work based on business, operational, and compliance risk. • Ability to work on site at the Whitby facility and support planned maintenance, implementation, testing, and critical operational activities as required. • Relevant Microsoft, VMware, networking, cybersecurity, automation, or IT service-management certifications are considered an asset. Compensation The estimated annualized pay range for this position in Ontario is $76,400.00–$114,575.00.