Director of Manufacturing Engineering & Reliability

Position Overview

The Director of Manufacturing Engineering & Reliability is a senior, working leader responsible for establishing a new enterprise capability that elevates how Stella-Jones 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 our 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 Operational Innovation & Excellence Center (OIEC), identifying constraints on the plant floor and turning them into practical, sustainable engineering solutions.

Because this is 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.

This position can be based remotely anywhere in the continental United States, ideally near a major commercial airport to accommodate regular travel (up to 60%) across our North American manufacturing network. Candidates residing near a Stella-Jones corporate office (including Lenexa, Kansas, Montreal QC, etc) or near a manufacturing location are also welcome to operate on a hybrid schedule.

Core Responsibilities

The Director will drive five core pillars that connect day-to-day plant realities with enterprise strategy:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Capital Project & PMO Integration

• Lead the technical and engineering governance of capital initiatives, partnering with the PMO, plant operations, and outside engineering firms to ensure projects are operable, maintainable, and built to company standards.
• Early Conceptual Engineering: Partner with Operations and the PMO at project inception to define technical problem statements, design bases, engineering alternatives, and preliminary technical scopes and estimates.
• Liaison & Specification Alignment: Partner with the PM and plant teams to translate operational needs into rigorous equipment and engineering specifications, interfacing directly with outside architectural/engineering (A&E) firms on technical requirements.
• 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.

4. Automation, Controls & Operational Technology (OT)

• Lead the manufacturing-engineering workstream for Stella-Jones' 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.

5. Engineering Standards, Governance & Leadership

• Establish the technical operating baseline for Stella-Jones 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.

Leadership Profile

We are seeking a decisive, mission-oriented leader who thrives in dynamic environments where direction must be established, consensus built, and results delivered.

• 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.

Key Qualifications

• 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 are a plus.