Our client is a well established and expanding Australian food manufacturing business, supplying fresh products into major national supermarket chains. Known for its commitment to quality, food safety and operational performance, the business operates at scale and continues to invest heavily across its people, systems and production capability to support ongoing growth.
Privately owned and underpinned by strong values, the organisation has built a long standing presence within the Australian fresh food sector. With demand continuing to accelerate and production requirements increasing, they are now looking to appoint an experienced Head of Reliability and Maintenance to strengthen site performance and asset capability.
This is a high impact leadership role with strong visibility across the executive team, offering the opportunity to shape how reliability, maintenance and operational standards are embedded and sustained across the business.
About The Role
This is not a maintenance management role. This is a rare opportunity to step into a newly created leadership position and design a best in class reliability function from the ground up within a large scale, complex industrial operation.
You will take full ownership of site wide asset performance, lead a multi shift maintenance team and implement the systems, structure and discipline required to drive world class reliability across a critical production environment.
If you are a commercially minded maintenance leader who thrives on building systems, leading people and influencing at executive level, this is a role where you can genuinely make your mark.
Reporting directly to the General Manager, you will operate as the senior authority on all things maintenance, reliability and asset performance across the site.
You will lead an established team, while introducing the frameworks, metrics and governance required to elevate performance. This is a hands on leadership role where you will shape strategy while staying close enough to the floor to drive real change.
Key Responsibilities:
- Drive a proactive safety culture across maintenance and operations, ensuring full alignment with WHS, environmental and regulatory standards. This is about leadership and ownership, not just compliance.
- Design and implement a structured preventative maintenance program, improve equipment uptime and shift the balance from reactive to planned maintenance. Establish clear performance metrics including OEE and drive continuous improvement.
- Introduce robust asset tracking and condition monitoring, develop lifecycle strategies and lead capital planning. Provide clear, data driven insights to support investment decisions.
- Own the implementation and governance of a CMMS platform, embedding discipline across the team and using data to inform decisions at both operational and executive level.
- Manage the maintenance budget end to end including labour, contractors and spares. Drive cost efficiency while maintaining high standards of reliability and performance.
- Build, mentor and retain a high performing team. Establish a culture of accountability, pride and continuous improvement across all levels of the function.
You are an experienced maintenance or reliability leader with a strong track record in heavy industrial or plant based environments such as manufacturing, mining, waste, agriculture or similar.
You bring:
- Proven experience in a senior maintenance, engineering or reliability leadership role
- A strong track record of building or transforming maintenance systems and processes
- Deep understanding of CMMS implementation and optimisation
- A hands on leadership style with the ability to influence from the workshop floor through to executive level
- Trade or engineering qualifications with solid technical credibility
- Strong commercial acumen with the ability to manage budgets, analyse cost drivers and build business cases
- A newly created leadership role with genuine autonomy and influence
- The opportunity to build and shape a function from the ground up
- Direct access to senior leadership and a seat at the decision making table
- A growing, investment backed operation with strong long term outlook
- Competitive salary package including performance incentives
- A high performing team ready for strong leadership and direction
