Aradh Suresh

Nov 2025 — present

Independent architect, writer, builder

Synopse Technologies · Remote

Left full-time employment to work on industrial data architecture in the open. The output is deliberately two-sided: instrumented builds that produce numbers, and essays that make the argument those numbers support. Both are public, and the builds that failed are published as readily as the ones that worked.

• Reference stacks built and measured end to end: Ignition on k3s, a SCADA fleet generated from one repository, Sparkplug B interoperability, a Unified Namespace assembled from parts, TimescaleDB and ClickHouse under a ten-million-reading load.
• Comparative decisions published with the measurement attached — Redpanda Connect against Node-RED, ClickHouse against TimescaleDB, Proxmox against VMware. Two of them found that the rig, not the software, was what I had actually measured.
• Production multi-tenant SaaS shipped solo: Next.js, Supabase/PostgreSQL with row-level security, Vercel, Playwright and Vitest gates, Sentry, nightly encrypted backups with a tested restore path.
• AI placed next to control without a write path. A tag copilot and an energy-systems copilot answer questions against live plant data, and are read-only by construction rather than by policy.
• Upstream contributor to FUXA (open-source SCADA): a permissions guard merged into the project.

2014 — Oct 2025

Senior SCADA Engineer

Empower, Dubai · Dubai, UAE

Responsible for the automation, SCADA and OT security estate, and for the engineers and the projects that changed it. The work ran in two directions at once: keeping a very large installed base running, and leading the security and digitalisation programmes that modernised it.

• Estate scale: 70+ plants, roughly 1,200–1,500 PLC systems, 100+ SCADA systems, around 600 protocol gateways and 1,200 meters — a distributed estate carrying more than 400,000 tags, brought together in a central command and control centre.
• Led a team of engineers, and owned the project side with it — scope of work, tender documentation, vendor evaluation and delivery management for the security and digitalisation programmes.
• Multi-protocol integration across Modbus, BACnet, EtherNet/IP and OPC, plus the rest of the mix a heterogeneous estate accumulates over two decades.
• OT security programme: IEC 62443 alignment, firewall and segmentation design, security auditing, threat detection, centrally managed antivirus, and automated patching across assets that cannot simply be rebooted.
• Virtualised the SCADA and historian infrastructure on VMware ESXi — consolidation, snapshots and a real recovery path for systems that had been running on individual machines.
• The estate itself was principally Rockwell. On top of it I built the IIoT monitoring layer — MQTT with Sparkplug B, time-series storage, Grafana — and Python acquisition against Allen-Bradley controllers reading 600 addresses in 40 ms via pylogix.
• Alarm management, and geospatial asset mapping of the estate in GeoPandas and Folium.

2018 — 2019

Data science, deliberately

A parallel track rather than a pivot: Python, Pandas, time-series analysis and machine-learning fundamentals, applied straight back into the industrial domain — pump-health monitoring, compliance analytics, geospatial mapping. It is the reason the later work reaches for a measurement instead of an opinion.

2012 — 2014

Project Engineer

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) · Dubai, UAE

Straight controls work, and the years that put the hours in: PLC programming and commissioning, SCADA integration, application development, and the reporting layer on top. Nothing written on this site treats the plant floor as an abstraction, and this is why.

2010 — 2012

Application Engineer

Masseera Industrial Automation · Dubai, UAE

Where it started. PLC and SCADA application engineering across the vendor platforms an integrator sees in rotation, which is the fastest way there is to learn that no two plants agree on anything.