About this role
Are you ready to move your career forward and help shape our company’s and customers’ futures?
If you aspire to challenge yourself, work with the best in the industry and join a successful team where you can make a meaningful contribution, then we invite you to join us at Ketjen Corporation, a provider of advanced catalyst solutions to leading producers in the petrochemical, refining, and specialty chemicals industries. Together, we can create a legacy marked by innovation, excitement, and energy.
Position Summary Ketjen is hiring a Head of Infrastructure and Cybersecurity to own the network, systems, and security that the company runs on every day, and to build a security program that covers both corporate IT and the plant floor. Ketjen's separation from Albemarle's shared network and security environment is in its final stretch and is expected to close out over the next few months. The larger and longer-running part of this job is what comes next: standing up the permanent infrastructure and security organization, moving day-to-day operations to a managed service provider, and running a stable, well-secured environment across every site.
This is a hands-on leadership role. The Head will manage a small core team and a selection of outside providers across network, cloud, endpoint, and security tooling, and will own the relationship with whichever managed service provider or providers take on day-to-day operations. This person will be the one accountable for ensuring critical systems availability.
Reporting and Key Relationships Reports to Chief Information Officer. Works closely with the Head of Applications, the plant and manufacturing leadership teams, EHS, and outside managed service providers and security vendors. Partners with the KPS portfolio operations team on the separation timeline
What You Will Do: Network and Infrastructure
• Evaluate the current network, infrastructure, and security environment across every site, and use that assessment to decide what to keep, consolidate, or replace.
• Own the design and operation of Ketjen's global network, including switching, wireless, SD-WAN, and internet circuits at every manufacturing site, lab, and office.
• Build world-class infrastructure on the shop floor, giving manufacturing teams resilient, secure, and well-supported plant networks, wireless coverage, device connectivity, and edge infrastructure that enable safe, reliable, data-driven operations.
• Run the virtualization and compute environments that supports the business, including on-premises infrastructure at the Houston and Amsterdam manufacturing sites and the cloud workloads that sit alongside them.
• Manage backup, storage, and disaster recovery so that a lost server or a bad day at one site never turns into lost data.
• Own end-user computing, including laptops, mobile devices, and the tools people use to collaborate and get work done.
MSP Transition and IT Organization
• Lead the transition of day-to-day infrastructure operations to a managed service provider, including scoping the work, selecting the partner, and managing a clean handoff.
• Design the permanent infrastructure and security team, deciding what stays in-house, such as architecture, security oversight, and vendor governance, versus what the managed provider runs.
• Close out any remaining separation-related network and security items, including any final transition services agreement dependencies, expected to wrap up within the next few months.
Cybersecurity, IT and OT
• Build and run the cybersecurity program across corporate systems, cloud, and third parties, including endpoint protection, vulnerability management, and log monitoring.
• Extend that same discipline into the plants. Manufacturing sites depend on control systems and equipment networks that carry real safety and uptime risk, and this role owns segmenting, monitoring, and hardening that environment alongside the corporate one.
• Manage identity and access, including privileged access for administrators and vendors, and keep that access tightly controlled across a global footprint.
• Run security awareness training and phishing simulation so the human side of security keeps pace with the technical side.
• Own incident response. Be the person who runs the room when something goes wrong.
Managed Service Provider and Vendor Governance
• Own the ongoing relationship with the managed service provider or providers running infrastructure and security operations, including service levels, escalation, and regular performance review.
• Take the lead on negotiating Ketjen's key infrastructure and security contracts, including the managed service agreement itself, and make the strategic calls on what to insource, outsource, or consolidate.
• Manage the telecom carriers and specialty security vendors that sit outside the managed provider's scope.
• Rationalize a vendor list that has grown organically. Several categories, including monitoring, log analysis, and remote access tools, currently have overlapping products, and part of this role is deciding what stays and what gets consolidated.
Team, Budget, and Operations
• Build and lead the infrastructure and security team, including deciding what talent to hire directly versus source through partners.
• Own the infrastructure and security budget, and make the case for investment in terms the business understands.
• Run IT service management with clear metrics so leadership always knows the state of the environment.
What You Bring Required:
• Bachelor's degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, or a related field.
• At least 10 years in infrastructure and security roles, including several years in a senior leadership capacity.
• Direct experience securing an operational technology or industrial control system environment, not just corporate IT.
• A track record of building infrastructure and security teams and transitioning day-to-day operations to a managed service provider model.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern infrastructure and security tooling, including SD-WAN, next-generation firewalls, endpoint protection, privileged access management, and SIEM or log analysis platforms.
• Experience managing infrastructure and security across multiple countries and regions.
• A history of managing outside vendors and managed service providers, including contract negotiation and performance management.
• Comfort owning a budget and defending it to non-technical executives.
Preferred:
• A relevant certification such as CISSP, CISM, or GICSP.
• Familiarity with industrial security standards such as IEC 62443 or NIST 800-82.
• Experience in chemicals, manufacturing, or another process industry with continuous operations.
• Experience in a private equity owned or sponsor-backed company.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 at enterprise scale.
• A history of cleaning up vendor sprawl and consolidating overlapping tools.
• Experience with a prior carve-out, divestiture, or standalone technology buildout.
What We Are Looking For:
• Someone who can take a newly separated environment and turn it into a mature, steady-state operation, not just someone who likes new builds.
• A leader who takes plant safety and uptime as seriously as any data center, and who understands that OT risk is not the same as IT risk.
• Someone who has managed a managed service provider relationship before and knows how to hold a partner accountable.
• A clear communicator who can explain technical risk and investment decisions to executives who are not technologists.
Location and Travel:
• Based at Ketjen's headquarters in Houston, Texas.
• Regular travel to manufacturing sites and offices.
Benefits of Joining Ketjen
• Competitive compensation
• Comprehensive benefits package
• A diverse array of resources to support you professionally and personally.
Apply today and help Ketjen unleash the POTENTIAL of advanced chemistry for industries that power the world.