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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IoT Solutions Specialist

💰 $ - $

IoTEmbedded SystemsCloudEdge ComputingSolutions Architecture

🎯 Role Definition

The IoT Solutions Specialist is a hands-on technical leader and customer-facing engineer responsible for designing, validating, and delivering end-to-end Internet of Things solutions. This role bridges hardware, firmware, connectivity, edge compute, and cloud analytics to solve real-world business problems. The ideal candidate owns technical pre-sales activities, leads proof-of-concepts (POCs), creates scalable reference architectures, ensures device and data security, and partners closely with product, firmware, cloud, and sales teams to drive successful IoT deployments.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Embedded Systems Engineer
  • Cloud/Platform Engineer with IoT exposure
  • Field Applications Engineer (hardware/firmware)

Advancement To:

  • Senior IoT Solutions Architect
  • Head of IoT/Connected Products
  • Director of Edge & IoT Platforms

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Manager (IoT / Connected Devices)
  • Technical Sales Engineer / Solutions Engineering Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end technical design and architecture of IoT solutions, including device selection, edge compute architecture, connectivity strategy (Wi‑Fi, BLE, LoRaWAN, NB‑IoT, LTE‑M), and cloud integration approaches (AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub, Google Cloud IoT).
  • Own and execute technical pre-sales engagements: drive discovery workshops, translate business requirements into solution proposals, produce technical responses for RFPs, and present architecture recommendations to C‑level stakeholders.
  • Plan, scope, and deliver proof‑of‑concepts (POCs) and pilot projects that validate device interoperability, connectivity stability, data flows, and end‑to‑end system performance under production-like loads.
  • Develop and document secure device on‑boarding and provisioning processes (symmetric/asymmetric keys, device certificates, TPM/secure element integration, and provisioning services).
  • Define and implement OTA (over‑the‑air) firmware update strategies, rollback mechanisms, and staged deployment patterns to minimize downtime and operational risk.
  • Design telemetry pipelines and data models: define message schemas, payload compression strategies, message routing, storage, and retention policies to support analytics and reporting.
  • Integrate edge compute patterns and containerized workloads (e.g., Docker, K3s, Balena) for local processing, filtering, and transformation to reduce cloud costs and latency.
  • Develop device lifecycle management plans including commissioning, monitoring, diagnostics, remote troubleshooting, and decommissioning strategies.
  • Architect and implement secure communication patterns (MQTT, AMQP, CoAP, HTTPS) with encryption, authentication, authorization, and replay protection across device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device channels.
  • Collaborate with firmware and hardware engineering to optimize device power consumption, radio performance, and sensor sampling strategies for battery‑powered and constrained devices.
  • Create reusable reference architectures, solution blueprints, and integration templates for SAP/ERP, SCADA, MES, and analytics platforms to accelerate customer deployments.
  • Define and measure KPIs for IoT solutions such as device uptime, message delivery rate, latency, power consumption, and total cost of ownership (TCO), and present results to stakeholders.
  • Lead incident response for IoT platform outages and major device fleet issues: drive root cause analysis, mitigation plans, and permanent corrective actions.
  • Manage vendor and partner integrations for SIM/Connectivity providers, cloud services, certificate authorities, gateways, and device manufacturers to deliver end-to-end solutions.
  • Provide technical guidance and hands‑on support during pilot-to-production transitions, ensuring scalability, multi‑tenant security, and compliance with regulatory and industry standards.
  • Perform edge and cloud cost modeling, recommend architecture changes to optimize cost/performance, and support procurement decisions for hardware and connectivity.
  • Implement data governance, privacy, and compliance controls for IoT data, including PII handling, encryption at rest, data residency, and retention requirements.
  • Build dashboards, alerts, and automated operations workflows using cloud-native monitoring tools and third‑party platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor).
  • Facilitate cross-functional communication between product management, engineering, operations, and customer success to ensure aligned delivery and lifecycle management.
  • Conduct feasibility studies and proof points for advanced IoT capabilities such as digital twins, predictive maintenance models, federated learning at the edge, and device‑level AI/ML inference.
  • Author deployment runbooks, best practice guides, and developer enablement content (APIs, SDKs, sample code) to accelerate internal and customer engineering teams.
  • Evaluate and recommend security frameworks and certifications for IoT deployments (ISO 27001, IEC 62443, NIST IoT standards) and support compliance assessments and audits.
  • Provide mentoring and technical leadership to junior engineers and field teams; establish design review processes and ensure high‑quality deliverables.
  • Coordinate large‑scale device rollouts and field operations with logistics, manufacturing, and supply chain partners to ensure on‑time and on‑budget deployments.
  • Continuously research emerging IoT technologies (edge AI, time‑sensitive networking, new low‑power radios) and incorporate relevant innovations into roadmaps and customer proposals.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist sales with technical demos, sandbox environments, and customer onboarding sessions.
  • Provide periodic training for customer support and field engineering teams on new devices and platform updates.
  • Maintain up‑to‑date documentation for APIs, SDKs, and platform change logs to reduce support friction.
  • Help define SLAs and operational playbooks for IoT managed services offerings.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with IoT platforms and cloud integrations (AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, Google Cloud IoT) and ability to architect scalable, secure solutions.
  • Proficiency in device communication protocols: MQTT, AMQP, CoAP, HTTPS, WebSockets; experience with message brokers and telemetry ingestion patterns.
  • Hands‑on knowledge of embedded firmware development and hardware constraints; familiarity with C/C++, RTOS, and low‑power design techniques.
  • Strong understanding of cellular and LPWAN technologies (NB‑IoT, LTE‑M, LoRaWAN), Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and relevant antenna/radio tradeoffs.
  • Experience with device provisioning, PKI, secure elements (e.g., TPM), certificate lifecycle management, and identity management for devices.
  • Familiarity with edge computing frameworks, containerization (Docker), orchestration (K3s, Kubernetes), and edge device management platforms.
  • Ability to build and manage CI/CD pipelines for firmware and cloud deployments; knowledge of Git, Jenkins/GitHub Actions, artifact registries.
  • Data engineering fundamentals: message schemas (JSON/CBOR), streaming ingestion (Kafka, Kinesis), time-series databases (InfluxDB, Timescale), and analytics toolchains.
  • Expertise in OTA update mechanisms, delta updates, rollback strategies, and staged release management for device fleets.
  • Knowledge of security best practices for IoT, including encryption, secure boot, vulnerability management, and threat modeling.
  • Practical experience integrating IoT solutions with enterprise systems (REST APIs, MQTT bridges, OPC UA, SOAP, SQL/NoSQL backends).
  • Monitoring & observability skills: logging, distributed tracing, metrics, alerting, and incident management for device fleets and cloud services.

Soft Skills

  • Strong customer-facing communication skills: able to translate technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders and build trust in technical decisions.
  • Consultative selling mindset: balancing technical feasibility, cost, and time‑to‑market in solution recommendations.
  • Problem‑solving and analytical thinking with a hands‑on, get‑it‑done attitude during POCs and escalations.
  • Cross-functional collaboration: experience working with product, sales, firmware, cloud engineering, and operations teams.
  • Project leadership and time management: able to drive multi‑disciplinary projects with competing priorities and tight timelines.
  • Mentoring and knowledge sharing: comfortable training junior engineers and enabling field teams.
  • Attention to detail for security, compliance, and operational runbooks.
  • Adaptability to rapidly evolving technology stacks and customer requirements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in a relevant discipline or MBA for candidate(s) targeting product/portfolio leadership.
  • Professional certifications in cloud platforms (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure IoT Developer), security (CISSP, GIAC), or IoT-specific programs.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Electrical Engineering / Electronics
  • Telecommunications / Networking
  • Data Science / Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of hands‑on experience in IoT, embedded systems, or cloud integrations; for senior roles 5–10+ years with multiple full product lifecycle deployments.

Preferred:

  • Proven track record delivering commercial IoT products or managed IoT services at scale (100s–100k+ devices).
  • Experience owning technical pre‑sales activities and shepherding POCs into production.
  • Prior experience working with industrial IoT (IIoT), smart city, utilities, logistics, or enterprise asset tracking deployments is highly desirable.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of regulatory and compliance landscapes for IoT deployments in target industries.
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