The Company

Our client is an established Australian food manufacturing business, and are seeking a highly capable Head of Engineering to lead the engineering, maintenance, and asset management function at one of its major WA production sites. The facility has undergone significant capital investment over the past two decades, including substantial recent upgrades, and continues to play a critical role in the organisation’s national supply chain.
With both modernised and ageing infrastructure on site, this role is central to shaping long-term engineering strategy while ensuring day-to-day operational continuity. The successful candidate will lead the shift from reactive to preventative maintenance, uplift reliability performance, and build a strong culture of urgency, accountability, and operational excellence. This is a pivotal leadership appointment for an engineering professional who thrives in complex, high-risk, fast-paced production environments.
 
The Role

Reporting to the Divisional General Manager and sitting as part of the Senior Leadership Group your responsibilities will include:

• Provide strategic and operational leadership of the engineering and maintenance function.
• Drive a proactive, reliability-centred maintenance strategy to reduce unplanned downtime.
• Oversee preventative, predictive, and condition-based maintenance programs.
• Partner closely with Operations to enhance asset performance, uptime, and cross-functional alignment.
• Support development and execution of the long-term site master plan.
• Provide engineering guidance during major upgrades to ensure continuity of production.
• Manage a multi million dollar repairs and maintenance budget and contribute to capital planning decisions.
• Ensure compliance with WHS, food safety, environmental and regulatory standards.
• Lead RCA, continuous improvement and automation/technology initiatives.
• Build capability within the engineering team through coaching, development and succession planning.
• Oversee contractor management, critical spares, and essential services infrastructure.
• Deliver against key KPIs including OEE, downtime, planned vs unplanned work, yield and cost-per-kilo.

Background & Experience

In order to be successful in the role you will have the following skills & experience:

• Extensive engineering leadership experience across food, FMCG, or related high-risk manufacturing.
• Proven capability managing both ageing assets and newly commissioned equipment.
• Demonstrated success leading reliability, maintenance planning and asset management programs.
• Experience driving the shift from reactive to preventative and predictive maintenance.
• Strong WHS leadership and a consistent track record of building safety-first cultures.
• Skilled in root cause analysis, continuous improvement and lean methodologies.
• Experience supporting or overseeing capital projects from design through commissioning.
• Strong commercial acumen in managing budgets, contractors, and cost performance metrics.
• Excellent stakeholder management and the ability to collaborate effectively with Operations.

 
What’s on Offer

This is a high-impact leadership opportunity to shape the engineering, reliability and asset management agenda for a major WA manufacturing site. You’ll play a central role in long-term strategic planning while influencing day-to-day performance and driving a step change in culture, capability and operational excellence. The organisation offers the platform, investment and support to make a meaningful and lasting impact, along with genuine career progression for a proven engineering leader.
If you would like to discuss this opportunity further you can contact Ricky Phare at Blackbook Executive on (03) 9823 7403.
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