Director of Manufacturing Engineering

Reporting to the COO, the Director of Manufacturing Engineering & Reliability is a senior, working leader responsible for establishing a new enterprise capability within the Operational Innovation & Excellence Center (OIEC), that elevates how the company's plants operate, maintain critical assets, integrate capital improvements, and adopt future-ready operational technologies. This is an operations-facing engineering role focused on the physical performance, process reliability, equipment capability, and infrastructure across the North American manufacturing network. It is not a product design, product development, or laboratory R&D position.

The Director serves as the technical engine of the OIEC, identifying constraints on the plant floor and turning them into practical, sustainable engineering solutions. As a brand-new role and function, success will not come from managing an established department, but from building an operating model from the ground up. The Director must lead through a complex matrix - partnering with Plant Leadership, Operations, Maintenance, the PMO, IT/OT, and external engineering firms - establishing consensus on standards where none exist today, creating momentum amid ambiguity, and remaining directly accountable for field-level operational impact.

Location: Kansas City or Remote (near major airport)

Key Responsibilities - Rather than administering isolated activities, the Director drives five core pillars that connect day-to-day plant realities with enterprise strategy:

Engineering Process & Equipment Optimization - Translate plant floor bottlenecks into high-value engineering solutions that improve throughput, safety, and operating margins across treating, material handling, and utilities.

• Process & Bottleneck Engineering: Partnering to analyze operational workflows, chemical treating processes, drying cycles, and yard material flow to eliminate constraints and reduce cycle times.
• Equipment & Facility Capability: Evaluate industrial equipment condition, capability, obsolescence, and total cost of ownership; formulate sound engineering alternatives for retrofits, replacements, or capacity debottlenecking.
• Engineering-Led Continuous Improvement: Apply disciplined problem-solving and CI methodologies with deep engineering rigor, ensuring process modifications are technically sound, safe, and adopted into standard operating procedures.
• Repeatable Solutions: Identify high-impact solutions at one facility and adapt them across the network, accounting for unique plant layouts and regional operating contexts.

Asset Reliability & Maintenance Strategy - Build the enterprise reliability framework and technical foundation needed to shift facilities from reactive repairs to predictive asset health, in close partnership with plant maintenance.

• Reliability Capability Building: Develop and roll out consensus-based reliability frameworks, introducing asset criticality modeling, bad-actor resolution, and lifecycle asset management to plants across the enterprise.
• Maintenance System Standards: Identify opportunities to establish practical corporate methodologies for preventive/predictive maintenance (PM/PdM), condition monitoring, vibration/oil analysis, and critical spares philosophy without overburdening plant personnel.
• Chronic Failure Elimination: Act as the senior technical resource for plants facing recurring equipment failures, facilitating structured root-cause analysis (RCA) and permanent corrective redesigns.
• Field Partnership & Transition: Respect plant autonomy, day-to-day maintenance execution remains with local plant teams, while this role provides the technical standards, coaching, and engineering muscle to build long-term site capability.

Capital Project & PMO Integration - Own the technical integrity and engineering suitability of capital initiatives, serving as the expert liaison between plant operations, the PMO, and outside engineering firms.

• Early Conceptual Engineering: Partner with Operations and the PMO at project inception to define technical problem statements, design bases, engineering alternatives, and preliminary rough-order-of-magnitude estimates.
• Liaison & Specification Alignment: Be the liaison between plant operators and outside architectural/engineering (A&E) firms, translating operational needs into rigorous equipment and civil/mechanical specifications.
• Technical Quality Assurance: Review and challenge third-party engineering designs to guarantee that constructability, operability, maintainability, and safety codes are strictly satisfied prior to procurement and installation.

Automation, Controls & Operational Technology (OT) - Lead the manufacturing-engineering workstream for Automation and AI Roadmap (Project Blueprint), ensuring technology is deployed on a solid operational foundation.

• Foundation-First Execution: Ground all automation investments in the core principle that automation requires stable foundations: Maintenance, Process, Controls, and Data. Avoid automating chaos or placing sensors on unmaintained assets.
• Use-Case & Business-Case Development: Identify, evaluate, and prioritize practical use cases for robotics, automated material handling, inline vision inspection, and sensor instrumentation that deliver verifiable payback (ROIC, EBITDA, EPS).
• IT/OT Partnership: Partner closely with the separate IT/OT team to ensure plant controls, PLCs, edge devices, and historian architectures align seamlessly with enterprise cybersecurity and infrastructure standards.
• Frontline Adoption: Ensure automation programs integrate comprehensive change management, training, and standard work so plant crews embrace and sustain new operational technologies.

Engineering Standards, Governance & Leadership - Establish the technical operating baseline while developing a lean, high-performing technical team that leads through influence and expertise.

• Enterprise Engineering Standards: Formulate common design, construction, equipment, and documentation specifications for facilities, treating systems, and physical plant assets.
• Knowledge Repository: Create an accessible technical knowledge base documenting proven solutions, equipment benchmarks, vendor performance, and lessons learned across the network.
• Talent & Matrix Leadership: Directly lead and mentor the initial Engineering & Reliability team while establishing an active, trusted presence in the field that gains alignment across operations, finance, and safety.
• Expert Management: Recognize technical knowledge gaps, identify and engage specialized external engineering experts and OEMs, manage their delivery tightly, and retain ultimate accountability for project success.

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Engineering (Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical, Civil, or Industrial) is strongly preferred. Equivalent technical education combined with proven engineering and operational leadership will be considered.
• Leadership Track Record: Demonstrated success leading teams, projects, units, or complex operational functions in high-accountability, performance-driven environments.
• Operational & Technical Breadth: Sound working grasp of process execution, heavy equipment, process flow, controls, maintenance systems, or capital projects, with the intellectual agility to lead multidisciplinary initiatives.
• Learning Agility: Proven ability to enter an unfamiliar industry, ask incisive questions, assess operational reality, and leverage technical SMEs effectively.
• Executive & Field Communication: Exceptional ability to communicate technical tradeoffs, capital risks, and business cases to both frontline workers and senior executive leadership.
• Travel Commitment: Willingness and ability to travel 50%-60% across manufacturing facilities in the United States and Canada.
• Certifications (Valued, Not Required): PE license, CMRP/CRL (reliability), PMP, or Lean/Six Sigma credentials.

• Mission-Oriented: Translates high-level corporate vision into clear, prioritized, and executable operational roadmaps.
• Decisive Under Uncertainty: Comfortable making sound decisions with imperfect data; moves work forward and course-corrects quickly as facts evolve.
• Extreme Accountability: Takes personal ownership of outcomes rather than shifting responsibility to contractors, consultants, or matrix partners.
• Quick Study & Adaptable: Quickly grasps the nuances of wood-treating chemistry, heavy mechanical handling, and rail/utility logistics.
• Operationally Credible: Equally comfortable in executive boardrooms, A&E design sessions, and walking the plant yard in steel-toed boots with operators and millwrights.
• Collaborative Consensus Builder: Builds trust across plant and corporate boundaries, driving standardization through partnership rather than mandate.

Our client is a leading North American manufacturer of electrical distribution and transmission infrastructure products.

The company has grown significantly in the last decade. To foster continued growth, they have invested in capital improvements and expanded their lines of business through acquisition. Given this growth, they are establishing a Manufacturing Engineering and Reliability Center of Excellence. This is an exciting opportunity to build and grow this team from the ground up. If you are a high-ownership, adaptable and collaborative leader who can design/build/implement systems and structure, drive transformation, effectively influence in a matrixed environment, and foster a culture of continuous improvement to increase operational efficiency, this may be the right opportunity for you.