Maintenance Technician

This position is responsible for maintaining and improving plant instrumentation, automation, control systems, and related facility equipment to support safe, reliable, and compliant operations. The position plays a key role in calibration, troubleshooting, preventive maintenance, and continuous improvement efforts across the site while ensuring compliance with SOPs, GMPs, ISO/FSSC, HACCP, OSHA, and applicable environmental and safety standards. This position supports a broader and more technical scope than a traditional maintenance technician role, with primary responsibility for plant instrumentation, calibration, automation support, control system reliability, and compliance-related maintenance activities. In addition to standard maintenance duties, the role requires hands-on troubleshooting of sensors, transmitters, PLC-related controls, and other critical field devices that directly impact product quality, safety and operational uptime. An immediate business need for dedicated instrumentation support exists to assist with LOPA development, including identification, reliability and verification of critical instrumentation safeguards that support process safety and risk reduction efforts. The position also provides cross-functional production support, including material movement, changeover assistance, and workflow coordination, which adds operational value beyond maintenance alone. Balchem Corporation, and its subsidiaries, offers a competitive salary and benefits package and is an Equal Opportunity Employer. ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS Maintain and continuously improve the preventive maintenance program using CMMS (FIIX), with strong emphasis on instrumentation, controls, and automation assets. Coordinate with the Maintenance Manager, Operations Manager, engineering, and production personnel to schedule maintenance, repairs, calibrations, and planned downtime. Ensure plant instrumentation, automation systems, facility equipment and related processes are maintained in compliance with SOPs, GMPs, ISO/FSSC/HACCP, and federal, state and local safety and environmental standards. Partner with maintenance, quality, engineering and operations to troubleshoot failures, improve reliability and support continuous improvement initiatives. Test, inspect, troubleshoot, repair, maintain and validate instrumentation, automation and control equipment to ensure safe, reliable and accurate operation in accordance with product specifications, quality standards, SOPs and GMP requirements. Support and maintain packaging and processing instrumentation, PLC-related controls, sensors, transmitters, automated systems and associated field devices. Perform calibration, verification, adjustment and documentation of level transmitters, pressure sensors, RTDs, flow transmitters, scales and other critical instruments to ensure accuracy, traceability and compliance. Maintain instrumentation records, calibration schedules, troubleshooting documentation and related technical files to support audits, preventive maintenance and operational reliability. Act as a technical liaison between engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and vendors for instrumentation upgrades, troubleshooting support, repairs and continuous improvement projects. Provide production support as needed, while maintaining primary focus on instrumentation reliability, control system performance and maintenance support for critical plant operations. Provide operations support as team lead capacity as needed and by assisting with changeovers, supporting raw material handling and helping keep workflows organized and efficient across the plant. Communicate and coordinate with other departments and outside business people relevant to maintenance, repair and remodel project. REQUIREMENTS High school diploma or equivalent required. Forklift certification or ability to obtain certification. Experience with specialty chemical manufacturing processes, instrumentation, controls, automation systems and calibration practices. Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot sensors, transmitters, control devices and automated equipment, and to read technical manuals, drawings and process documentation. Strong communication skills (speaking, listening, writing) and ability to work well with people. Strong analytical, mathematical and problem-solving skills. Working knowledge of SOPs, quality systems and applicable regulatory requirements. Basic understanding of maintenance planning, cost awareness and resource management. Understanding of Lean Manufacturing and continuous improvement principles. Bending; lifting (20-45lbs); kneeling; walking; reaching with arms and hands. Operate various kinds of office equipment (PC, 10-key, copier, telephone, etc.). Operate production equipment and tools. Speaking, hearing, writing ability; color differentiation. Hand‑eye coordination; ability to read, understand and interpret graphs, charts, data, documents, manuals, etc. Critical thinking skills; analysis and data integration; exercise good judgment; interpret and understand discussions and instructions; intrinsic motivation; ability to learn and utilize new information, systems, processes, etc. WORK ENVIRONMENT 25% Office (air‑conditioned, heated) 75% Plant (exposure to extreme temperatures, noise levels, fumes, airborne particles, machines with moving parts) #J-18808-Ljbffr