Reliability Manager

Why Work at Kaneka North America?
At Kaneka North America, you'll find more than just a job-you'll find a place to build a career. We offer a people-first, safety-focused environment where employees are encouraged to learn, grow, and contribute. Whether you're early in your career or bringing years of experience, you'll have the chance to do meaningful work, collaborate across teams, and support products and industries that make a difference every day. Your contributions are valued, and your development is supported.

Our Culture & Values
Our culture is built on respect, teamwork, and doing things the right way. We believe people do their best work when they feel supported, trusted, and empowered to speak up and share ideas. Safety, integrity & trust, quality, and innovation guide everything we do, and we invest in our employees through continuous learning, collaboration, and opportunities for growth. At Kaneka North America, you're encouraged to take ownership of your work, grow your skills, and build a long-term career in an environment that values both accountability and people

Essential duties and responsibilities

Leadership, Talent Development & Organizational Capability

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Maintenance Engineering and Inspection team, establishing clear accountability for safety, compliance, technical quality, execution, communication, and results.
• Set clear objectives, assess performance, provide timely feedback, and foster a culture of ownership, reliability, ethical conduct, and continuous improvement.
• Develop technical and leadership capability through coaching, challenging assignments, professional development, role-based competency expectations, and documented development plans.
• Identify critical skills, capability gaps, succession risks, and future staffing needs within the Reliability and Inspection organization.
• Build bench strength for key technical and leadership positions and develop employees who can lead through both formal authority and cross-functional influence.

Reliability & Asset Management Strategy

• Design, implement, and sustain a comprehensive reliability and asset-management program for plant assets.
• Translate site business objectives, operating risks, and production requirements into practical reliability and asset-management priorities.
• Develop and maintain long-range asset strategies addressing equipment condition, lifecycle risk, obsolescence, maintainability, renewal requirements, and operational continuity.
• Establish and monitor reliability KPIs that demonstrate measurable improvement in equipment availability, performance, cost, and risk reduction.
• Drive initiatives to eliminate chronic equipment issues, reduce structural maintenance cost, and improve lifecycle value.
• Anticipate emerging equipment, regulatory, organizational, and business risks and convert them into practical plans, priorities, and recommendations.
• Drive appropriate adoption of digital technologies, analytics, automation, and emerging tools that improve asset management and engineering effectiveness.

Preventive & Predictive Maintenance Optimization

• Oversee development, optimization, and execution of preventive and predictive maintenance plans.
• Implement condition monitoring technologies, including vibration analysis, thermography, and oil analysis, and ensure timely corrective actions.
• Use equipment criticality, failure history, risk, and performance data to optimize maintenance strategies and task intervals.
• Maintain a critical spare-parts strategy that supports reliability, business continuity, and responsible inventory investment.

Mechanical Integrity & Inspection Assurance

• Own and manage the Mechanical Integrity program, ensuring compliance with Process Safety Management requirements, applicable regulations, RAGAGEPs, and company standards.
• Supervise nondestructive inspection programs and validate the adequacy of plant inspection and testing procedures.
• Ensure inspection databases, records, recommendations, and documentation are accurate, complete, current, and effectively managed.
• Communicate significant asset-integrity risks, compliance concerns, overdue actions, and required recovery plans to appropriate leadership.

Failure Analysis & Continuous Improvement

• Lead root cause failure analysis for significant equipment and system failures and ensure corrective actions are implemented and verified for effectiveness.
• Collaborate with vendors, operating units, and subject-matter experts to identify failure modes and eliminate recurrence.
• Recommend and implement improvements to equipment specifications, repair procedures, engineering standards, maintenance strategies, and workforce capability.
• Capture lessons learned and incorporate them into asset strategies, project scopes, design practices, and maintenance programs.

Business, Financial & Performance Management

• Develop and manage the Reliability and Inspection department budget, including forecasting, cost control, contractor requirements, and recovery planning.
• Develop recommendations using lifecycle cost, asset risk, equipment criticality, operational impact, compliance requirements, and available resources.
• Prepare cost-benefit analyses and business cases for major repairs, equipment renewals, reliability improvements, inspection initiatives, and technology investments.
• Monitor performance and spending against approved plans and proactively communicate material risks, deviations, options, recommendations, and recovery actions.
• Partner with Maintenance, Production, Finance, Supply Chain, and Capital Projects to improve asset-investment and maintenance-cost decisions.

Capital Investment & Reliability Integration

• Identify and develop equipment-renewal, mechanical-integrity, and reliability-improvement opportunities for consideration in annual and multi-year capital plans.
• Prepare and sponsor technically sound business cases that clearly describe asset risk, reliability impact, lifecycle cost, production impact, compliance considerations, alternatives, and recommendations.
• Support capital portfolio prioritization with objective equipment-condition, risk, failure-history, criticality, and operational-impact information.
• Serve as the reliability and asset-management subject-matter expert during project development, design, execution, commissioning, startup, and post-project review.
• Review equipment specifications and proposed modifications for reliability, maintainability, inspection accessibility, lifecycle cost, technical risk, and compliance with engineering standards.
• Ensure lessons learned from equipment failures, maintenance history, and operating experience are incorporated into project scopes and design standards.

Technical Support, Outages & Operational Readiness

• Provide technical leadership to maintenance planners, supervisors, technicians, engineers, and operating units for troubleshooting and job-plan development.
• Review and approve repair strategies within assigned authority, ensuring compliance with RAGAGEPs, quality requirements, and company standards.
• Support outage and turnaround scope development using asset condition, criticality, inspection findings, and reliability risk.
• Participate in pre-startup safety reviews, commissioning, startup, performance testing, and punch-list resolution.
• Provide technical support during emergencies or critical equipment failures as needed.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Stakeholder Influence

• Build trust and alignment across Production, Maintenance, Capital Projects, Process Control, HSSE, Finance, Supply Chain, corporate functions, and external technical organizations.
• Present complex technical, risk, financial, and business matters clearly and concisely to frontline personnel, technical staff, managers, site leadership, and corporate stakeholders.
• Resolve departmental conflicts and elevate cross-functional system issues with clear facts, options, recommendations, and business impact.
• Maintain strong relationships with Kaneka Corporate and global Kaneka facilities and support KGES initiatives that improve consistency and excellence across sites.
• Lead sustainable change by defining the need, engaging stakeholders, establishing accountability, measuring outcomes, and adjusting implementation based on evidence.

Decision Rights & Role Boundaries

• Own execution, performance, communication, recovery planning, and results for the Reliability and Inspection function.
• Recommend site-level reliability strategies, capital priorities, standards, and resource needs to the Senior Director of Engineering & Maintenance.
• Operate within approved budgets, policies, standards, and delegated authority, and escalate matters involving significant risk acceptance, major resource tradeoffs, site-wide governance, or executive alignment.
• This role does not own the complete site capital portfolio, the Maintenance organization, the Capital Projects organization, Process Control, or site-wide Engineering and Maintenance governance.

Must demonstrate the following emotional intelligence skills:

• Emotional Empathy
• Positive Attitude
• Excellent Communication Skills
• Flexibility / Adaptability
• Interpersonal Skills

Expected Results

• Demonstrated commitment to safety and full compliance with HSSE, Process Safety Management, Mechanical Integrity, and regulatory requirements.
• Measurable improvement in equipment reliability, asset integrity, and reduction of unplanned downtime.
• Effective long-range asset strategies and well-supported reliability investment recommendations.
• Reliable execution of approved plans, budgets, inspections, corrective actions, and improvement initiatives.
• Effective development of team members, improved bench strength, and reduced succession and capability risk.
• Accurate, timely communication and reporting to stakeholders.
• Positive collaboration across departments and proactive adoption of reliability best practices.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities
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