Engineering and Maintenance Manager

Job Description

Job Description

Engineering and Maintenance Manager

Zina's Fine Foods, South Plainfield, New Jersey. On-site, full time. $140,000 to $170,000 per year.

Zina's Fine Foods is a refrigerated food manufacturer in South Plainfield, New Jersey. We make ready-to-eat salads, side dishes and prepared meals for national and regional retailers, and we are growing faster than our plant was built for.

We are hiring a Maintenance & Engineering Manager. You will report directly to the President and own the engineering function outright. There is no engineering layer above you and no corporate group to defer to. You decide what gets fixed, what gets bought, what gets automated and in what order.

Your team

You will lead a small in-house team covering controls, mechanical repair and facilities. You decide what each of them works on, week by week, and you are accountable for whether their time produced anything. You also direct our outside vendors for refrigeration, electrical and specialty service work.

Running the plant

• Own the PM program, the asset register and the spare parts you actually need on the shelf
• Be first to a breakdown, not third. You diagnose across mechanical, electrical, pneumatic and controls, and you still put your hands on the machine
• Find the recurring failures, fix the cause, and stop us paying for the same repair twice
• Set the machine parameters and changeover standards our operators follow
• Keep uptime honest with numbers you trust

Equipment you will work with

Cookers and chillers, mixers, fillers and depositors, labelers, checkweighers, metal detectors, conveyors, tray sealers and packaging lines, plus the compressed air, glycol, steam and refrigeration behind them. Not all of it came with documentation, and part of the job is making that equipment as reliable as the rest.

Capital projects and automation

• Tell us what to buy and what not to buy. We would rather hear "not yet" with a reason than spend the money twice
• Assess what we already own and say honestly what should be rebuilt, replaced or run to failure
• Find the suppliers, write the specification, get the quotes, compare them on real numbers and pick
• Decide where machinery goes so the workflow, the sanitation and the people all work
• Size what the line needs: power, air, water, drains, refrigeration load
• Run factory acceptance testing and site acceptance testing yourself, and refuse to sign off on equipment that does not perform
• Build the automation roadmap: what we automate first, what it costs, what it returns
• Tell us when the answer is another person rather than another machine

Engineering judgment and the limits of it

You will do the calculations behind our decisions. Where the work needs a licensed Professional Engineer's seal, permit drawings, structural capacity, service upgrades, you scope it, hire the firm and manage them. We expect you to know exactly where that line falls.

Compliance

Lockout/tagout, machine guarding, electrical safety and contractor control are yours. Our equipment and our maintenance practices have to hold up to GMP, HACCP and SQF, and to customer audits with little notice.

What you need

• Five or more years in maintenance or plant engineering in a food manufacturing plant, working under FDA or USDA rules. Food plant experience is required.
• Three or more years as a maintenance or engineering manager in a food plant, owning the PM program and the maintenance budget and deciding who does what
• Hands-on ability to diagnose and repair across mechanical, electrical, pneumatic and control systems
• Read and produce electrical schematics and process drawings, and size pumps, fans, motors, compressed air and refrigeration loads
• Experience selecting and commissioning production equipment: specification, quotes, vendor selection, acceptance testing
• Willing to be on the floor daily, in refrigerated and wet areas, and reachable when a line goes down
• Valid driver's license

No degree is required. If you came up through the trades and have run a plant's engineering, we want to talk to you.

Pay and benefits

• $140,000 to $170,000 per year, depending on experience
• Medical, dental and vision insurance starting January 1, 2027. The company pays part of the medical and dental cost. Coverage begins on the first of the month after 60 days of work.
• 401(k) with company match.
• New Jersey earned sick leave
• 10 days of paid time off
• Free salads from our own production, and ingredients at wholesale

To apply, use the Apply button on this page.