What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Reliability Engineer position at Ghirardelli Chocolate Company?
The Senior Reliability Engineer will lead efforts to improve equipment reliability, reduce downtime, and optimize maintenance strategies across production operations. This role bridges engineering, operations, and maintenance teams to ensure safe, efficient, and cost-effective manufacturing performance.
Qualifications:
- Develop and implement preventive and predictive maintenance programs using CMMS and reliability modeling tools.
- Lead multi-site reliability improvement programs and capital planning.
- Develop long-term asset management strategies aligned with business goals.
- Serve as SME for reliability engineering during audits, vendor evaluations, and CAPEX projects.
- Present reliability performance and cost-saving initiatives to senior leadership.
- Drive adoption of advanced analytics, digital tools, and condition-based monitoring.
- Partner with OEMs and engineering to improve equipment design to eliminate losses
- Own and implement breakdown analysis system (BDA) in the factory
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) for critical equipment.
- Define, track, and improve reliability KPIs (MTBF, MTTR, downtime, cost per intervention).
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive continuous improvement and equipment upgrades.
- Manage external service providers and ensure compliance with safety and technical standards.
- Identify critical parts and their reorder levels.
- Optimize spare parts inventory and standardization across production lines.
- Support capital projects and annual shutdown planning with reliability input.
- Train and mentor junior technicians and engineers in reliability best practices.
- Prepare preventive maintenance operations and annual shutdowns (preparation of the necessary human and material resources, etc.).
- Participate in the selection of new equipment and ensure the integration of maintenance constraints in the design of equipment.
- Prioritize maintenance actions within the allocated budget to meet production constraints.
- Update and improve the quality of the technical documentation used within the maintenance department.
- Serve on the Preventative Maintenance Pillar and support the other TMP pillars in the factory
- Work closely with the training department on technician skill gap closure
- Other duties as assigned by manager