Director of Engineering

We are partnering confidentially with a well-established, privately held food company to identify a Director of Maintenance & Automation to lead maintenance strategy, reliability, and technical capability across three food processing facilities in Iowa and Minnesota. This is not a role focused on keeping one plant running. It’s an opportunity to build a stronger maintenance and automation organization across multiple facilities. The Opportunity Each plant already has maintenance leadership. Your job is to bring those teams together, identify opportunities across locations, build consistency, and elevate the technical capabilities of the organization. The company has invested significantly in modern processing and packaging technology and now wants to build more of the technical expertise needed to support that equipment internally rather than relying heavily on OEMs and outside technicians. You’ll be responsible for: Leading and developing maintenance leaders across three facilities Building a consistent maintenance and reliability strategy Improving uptime, reliability and equipment performance Strengthening preventive and predictive maintenance programs Building internal expertise around controls, automation and troubleshooting Developing technicians and transferring technical knowledge Partnering with OEMs and holding vendors accountable Supporting capital projects, equipment upgrades and future automation initiatives What We’re Looking For We’re looking for a maintenance, engineering or automation leader who combines strong technical depth with the ability to lead people and build systems. Experience in food, beverage, meat, protein or another highly automated manufacturing environment is strongly preferred. Multi-site leadership experience is highly valued. You should have strong working knowledge of PLCs, controls, automated equipment, preventive/predictive maintenance and complex troubleshooting. You don't need to personally program every PLC, but you need enough technical depth to lead the people who do. Why This One? The plants exist. The equipment investment has been made. The teams are in place. What hasn't been fully built yet is the larger maintenance, automation and reliability strategy. That allows the right leader to put their fingerprints on how multiple facilities approach maintenance, controls, technical training, vendor relationships and equipment performance for years to come. #J-18808-Ljbffr Red Kite Recruiting