Plant Engineering & Maintenance Manager

ABOUT ALUMINUM 3104

Our VISION is to be Canada’s most trusted beverage packaging partner. To get there, we’re building the first modern aluminum beverage can plant in Canada, and the first aluminum beverage can plant in more than 40 years. Our 200,000 sq. ft., highly automated facility in Belleville, Ontario opens in late 2027. We built it for Canadian beverage brands, and we’re partnering with the Canadian aluminum supply chain, and bringing technical and operational expertise back home to strengthen Canada’s food and beverage security.

We’ll make precision aluminum cans to the exact specifications brewers and drink makers need. We’ll earn our reputation one good can, one kept promise and one honest conversation at a time. Because our lines are highly automated, the work here is about running, maintaining and improving modern production equipment. That means skilled careers, strong Total Rewards and the chance to build deep expertise.

We’re a startup with big plans, guided by four VALUES: Safety First. Quality Obsessed. Excellence Driven. Stronger Together. Phase one will create more than 100 jobs, most of them filled by people from the communities around our plant. We’ll pair them with experienced industry experts from around the world to build a team that sets the standard and brings a fresh perspective. As a greenfield business, we get to do things differently. We have no legacy systems and no inherited bureaucracy. What we become will come from the people we hire.

Who we’re looking for. We want people who are hungry to grow, willing to spend the time in extensive training and development programs, up for a challenge and comfortable with the unknown. We hire for character, values and attitude, and we will train for skills. If you’re tired of hearing “that’s the way it’s always been done,” and you’d rather build systems than inherit someone else’s, you’ll find a rewarding career here.

POSITION OBJECTIVE & SUMMARY

The Plant Engineering and Maintenance Manager owns every asset in a single-site, greenfield aluminum beverage can plant, from the cupper to the RTO. The role keeps equipment safe, available and running to standard, and turns a reactive start-up into a planned, reliability-driven operation. Scope covers maintenance, reliability, controls and automation, tooling, facilities, utilities and capital projects. One owner for the full asset life cycle, so nothing falls between the project team that installs a machine and the crew that keeps it running.

This role sits on the manufacturing leadership team and is accountable for uptime, asset risk and maintenance cost, not just for fixing what breaks. Production owns the line; this role owns the condition of the equipment it runs on. The mandate has three parts:

· Build the asset base right before first saleable can. Maintenance standards, CMMS, critical spares, documentation and a trained crew in place before commercial production, not chased during ramp.

· Run planned, not reactive. Shift the plant from breakdown response to planned and predictive work, and fix failures once through root cause, not repeated resets.

· Design for growth (speed and capacity). Asset standards, job plans, spares strategy and controls standards built to be copied, so growth expansion does not mean starting engineering over.

HOW THIS MANAGER WORKS

• Safety above all. Everyone goes home daily, this is nonnegotiable. As part of the Management Team, always ensure all work in the business is completed in compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act, applicable regulations, and the employer’s procedures.

• Planned over reactive. Measures the week by how much work went to plan, not by how many fires got put out.

• Fixes it once. Pushes past the reset to the root cause, and does not accept a repeat failure as normal.

• Holds the standard. Will not bypass a guard, accept an undocumented change or sign off incomplete handover to hit a date.

• Builder. Comfortable creating systems from nothing, then making them repeatable for the next line.

• Business first. Frames maintenance decisions in up-time, spoilage, cost per thousand and asset risk.

• Present on the floor. Known by technicians and operators on every shift, not just the day crew.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

Safety and Equipment Risk

• Oversee the high-hazard maintenance programs (lockout, electrical safety, safeguarding, confined space, hot work, heights, rigging and stored energy), and send no one on a task beyond their ticket.

• Build safety into equipment design, purchase, installation and modification, including pre-start health and safety.

• Hold the line on guards, interlocks and e-stops: nothing is bypassed to keep a line running, and no repaired or modified machine returns to service until guarding is verified.

• Partner with EHS on investigation of maintenance, electrical and contractor incidents, with corrective actions closed.

Budget, Contractors and Team

• Own the maintenance, engineering, utilities, contractor and capital budgets. Report variances early and separate real savings from deferred maintenance that only moves risk.

• Make repair-versus-replace calls on lifecycle cost, manage service contracts and warranties, and partner with Supply Chain to qualify and manage contractors and critical suppliers.

• Partner with HR on the 24/7 staffing model, skills matrix, apprenticeships, cross-training and succession, so the next line's start-up team comes from this one.

• Set the standard for troubleshooting, workmanship, documentation and housekeeping, applied consistently across shifts.

Maintenance and Reliability Strategy

• Build the asset hierarchy and criticality ranking, and set the right strategy for each critical asset, from preventive and condition-based to run-to-failure where justified.

• Set inspection and rebuild standards for the full can line, with annual and multi-year rebuild plans and reliability reviews on the bottleneck and highest-risk equipment.

• Tune PM intervals from failure history, OEM data and condition monitoring, and deploy predictive and precision maintenance where the return is there.

Breakdown Response and Root Cause

• Set the 24/7 escalation and response structure, and prioritize repairs on safety, quality, environment, customer and bottleneck impact, in that order.

• Control temporary repairs: risk-assessed, time-limited and tracked to permanent fix.

• Set clear RCA triggers and drive investigations to technical and systemic causes, with verified actions fed back into PMs, spares, procedures and standards across shifts and sites.

• Communicate major equipment events to plant leadership as they happen, with post-event reviews.

Work Management and CMMS

• Implement the CMMS with complete asset records, BOMs, job plans and PM schedules. No work without a work order.

• Oversee weekly planning and scheduling with Production, so planned work gets line time and is fully staged.

• Audit work-order quality, since closed-order data drives PMs, spares and the capital plan, and own shutdown planning through on-time completion.

Tooling, Spares and MRO

• Set tooling standards and track tooling life, tying condition to can defects with Quality and Process Engineering. No damaged or unapproved tooling goes back on a machine.

• Partner with Supply Chain on the storeroom and critical-spares strategy (risk, lead time, min/max, complete BOMs), maximizing repairables and standardizing components across lines.

POINT-IN-TIME / SECONDARY RESPONSIBILITIES

Facilities, Utilities and Environmental Controls

• Keep utilities reliable, sized for the operation and backed by redundancy and contingency plans.

• Ensure regulated assets are inspected as required and the plant stays in environmental compliance at all times.

Controls, Automation and OT Security

• Govern PLC, HMI, SCADA, drives, vision and network systems: standards, documentation, backup, version control and access.

• Own OT cybersecurity with IT, including network separation and controlled vendor remote access.

• Plan controls obsolescence before parts become unavailable, and track controls-related downtime and faults.

Capital Projects

• Build the annual and multi-year capital plan, and prepare scopes, business cases, budgets and schedules.

• Manage OEMs, integrators and contractors against scope, cost, schedule and safety, and hold every project to full handover before acceptance: drawings, source code, spares, PMs, training and safety validation.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· 10+ years in engineering, maintenance and/or reliability in manufacturing, with at least 5 years leading mechanical, electrical and controls teams.

· P.Eng. licence in good standing with PEO, or licensed in another Canadian province, or equivalent.

· Has run a 24/7 maintenance operation with PM programs, a CMMS, critical spares and formal root-cause analysis.

· Track record of building productive, accurate and collaborative teams.

· Degree in mechanical, electrical, controls, mechatronics, industrial or manufacturing engineering.

· Expert knowledge of Ontario OHSA, CSA lockout, electrical/gas safety and safeguarding standards.

ASSET QUALIFICATIONS (valued though not required)

• Aluminum beverage can or metal packaging experience.

• Has managed maintenance and capital budgets; delivered installations from specification through commissioning.

• Has built something: a greenfield plant, a major new line, a carve-out or a turnaround where HR and talent development was created rather than inherited.

• Understanding of control platforms and industrial networks.

• RCM and predictive maintenance programs; CMRP, PMP or Lean Six Sigma.

• Utilities, wastewater, combustion systems and environmental controls.