Director, Maintenance Engineering

Novolex

Lake Forest, IL

Pay: $180,000-$200,000/yr

Shift: Full time

Company Overview:

**Why Choose Us?**

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Novolex is a leading manufacturer of food, beverage, and specialty packaging that supports multiple industries including foodservice, restaurant delivery and carryout, food processing, grocery and retail, and industrial sectors. Novolex manufacturing and sourcing expertise spans a diverse range of substrates including resin, paper, molded fiber, aluminum and more. We provide customers a broad array of stock and customized solutions with 120 product categories, 250 brands and over 39,000 SKUs.

**Our Sustainability Commitment**

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The Novolex sustainability vision is built upon three pillars: our products, our operations and our people. Each is critically important to our growth and future as a business. These pillars form the foundation of our company-wide commitment to sustainability, helping us achieve our ambitious goals through our wide-ranging initiatives.

Job Description:

**Position Summary**

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The Director, Maintenance provides enterprise leadership for maintenance strategy, reliability performance, asset management, and maintenance execution across Novolex manufacturing operations. This role is accountable for developing the enterprise maintenance strategy, identifying the organizational capabilities and resource needs required to execute, advancing a standardized maintenance operating model, improving equipment uptime and asset reliability, strengthening preventive and predictive maintenance practices, and building scalable maintenance capability across plants. The Director partners closely with Operations, Engineering, EH&S, Procurement, Finance, and business leadership to align maintenance priorities, improve operational performance, reduce unplanned downtime, and support safe, reliable, and cost-effective manufacturing execution.

**Key Responsibilities**

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• Champion a safety-first maintenance culture and ensure compliance with company safety standards, maintenance procedures, equipment standards, and applicable regulatory requirements.
• Develop and lead the enterprise maintenance strategy, including preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, reliability improvement, asset lifecycle management, spare parts strategy, maintenance performance governance, and implementation priorities.
• Assess and identify organizational needs required to execute the maintenance strategy, including capability gaps, resource requirements, role clarity, skills development, governance routines, and support model requirements.
• Partner with plant leadership and maintenance teams to improve equipment uptime, reduce unplanned downtime, increase mean time between failures, and improve maintenance execution discipline across manufacturing sites.
• Drive standardization of maintenance systems, processes, metrics, tools, work order practices, planning and scheduling routines, and reliability best practices across the manufacturing network.
• Build organizational capability through leadership development, coaching, technical capability building, succession planning, and performance management for maintenance leaders and teams.
• Provide executive-level escalation support for complex equipment reliability, maintenance execution, asset performance, spare parts, contractor, and operational continuity issues.
• Partner with OEM’s, Engineering, Capital Projects, Operations, and plant leadership to support equipment design reviews, maintainability, startup readiness, commissioning, stabilization, and operational handoff for capital initiatives.
• Lead cross-functional maintenance projects from business case and scope development through planning, execution, commissioning, operational handoff, and benefits realization, with accountability for safety, schedule, budget, quality, risk, and performance outcomes.
• Develop and manage strategic OEM partnerships and service agreements to establish standardized preventive and predictive maintenance programs, recommended service intervals, technical support models, critical spare parts requirements, training, and equipment performance expectations.
• Develop and maintain maintenance performance reporting, including key metrics related to uptime, downtime, work order completion, preventive maintenance compliance, maintenance cost, asset reliability, and contractor performance.
• Collaborate with Procurement and Finance to optimize maintenance spend, spare parts inventory, vendor performance, contractor utilization, and service agreements.
• Perform additional duties as assigned.

**Qualifications**

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**Essential**

• 15+ years of progressive experience in maintenance leadership, reliability engineering, manufacturing operations, engineering, technical operations, or related manufacturing support functions.
• 8+ years of leadership experience leading multi-site maintenance, reliability, technical operations, or manufacturing support o