Digital Twins / IoT Systems

Digital twins are increasingly used in industrial, infrastructure, manufacture and smart city contexts, allowing organisations to model, monitor, predict failures, test scenarios and optimise performance before making changes to the physical model. This ability to test on a digital counterpart has become an operation priority in many cases and this has led to an increase in roles working in digital twins or IoT (Internet of Things) Systems.

IoT development roles revolve around device firmware and embedded systems, communication protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, and AMQP, edge computing, and the integration of sensor data into cloud platforms. Mid-level roles and above will be expected to have experience with IoT cloud services from AWS (IoT Core), Azure (IoT Hub) or GCP due to the attack surface created by connected device networks.

Digital twin roles focus on the modelling, simulation and real-time data integration that allows a physical system to be represented and interrogated digitally. These roles benefit from a familiarity with platforms such as Azure Digital Twins, NVIDIA Omniverse, or sector-specific simulation tools. But beyond the technical side, the ability to work with large volumes of time-series data and to collaborate with domain experts from engineering, operations, or facilities management is highly valued.

At the more senior end, roles increasingly involve defining the architecture of a twin programme across multiple assets or sites, and making the case for investment based on measurable operational outcomes.