Senior Project Controls Specialist

Senior Project Controls Specialist

Hecla Mining Company (NYSE: HL) is the largest U.S. and Canadian silver producer, with operating mines in Alaska, Idaho, and the Yukon. The company is building a centralized Capital Projects Group (CPG) to bring discipline, consistency, and accountability to a capital project portfolio exceeding $200 million annually, spanning tailings facilities, mine infrastructure, water treatment, and growth initiatives across all operating sites.

The Senior Project Controls Specialist will build the analytical foundation of that effort. This is not a role within an established controls department — it is a ground-floor opportunity to design and stand up the cost and schedule performance measurement systems for a publicly traded mining company with executive sponsorship and a clear mandate. The right candidate will shape how Hecla measures, reports, and governs capital project performance for years to come.

The CPG is responsible for project management, project controls, and delivery oversight on major capital projects company-wide. The Senior Project Controls Specialist will be foundational to the group's controls capability by helping implement earned value management, maintaining project baselines, and tracking project performance against approved budgets and schedules. The CPG is responsible for active management of major projects (>$10M), and for providing controls and advisory support to site-lead teams for smaller projects.

The ideal candidate combines strong project controls methodology with enough financial literacy to work directly with ERP data and coordinate with site and corporate finance staff. They understand that project controls exist to provide an independent assessment of project health — separate from the execution team's self-reporting — and they value working in an organization that treats objective performance data as the basis for decision-making.

Earned Value and Performance Measurement

• Establish and maintain cost and schedule baselines for major capital projects, aligned with approved project budgets and schedules.
• Implement and operate earned value management (EVM) processes, including calculation and reporting of planned value, earned value, actual cost, and derived performance indices (CPI, SPI). For projects not managed under full EVM, collect and report simplified performance metrics including percent-complete and estimate at completion.
• Produce monthly project performance reports for senior leadership and Hecla's capital investment review committee, including variance analyses, forecast-to-complete updates, and trend assessments.
• Monitor contingency drawdown against approved budgets and proactively flag when cost or schedule variances are approaching thresholds that require supplemental funding authorization or scope reassessment.

Stage Gate Support

Major capital projects at Hecla follow a stage gate process in which projects must pass through a series of formal decision points — typically up to three gates — before receiving full authorization to proceed. Each gate requires the project team to demonstrate that scope definition, cost estimates, risk assessment, and execution planning have reached a level of maturity appropriate for the next phase.

The number of gates is determined during the annual budget review based on project complexity and business risk. Simpler projects may have a single gate; complex or high-value projects progress through multiple gates from preliminary analysis through options evaluation, engineering, and final execution approval.

The Senior Project Controls Specialist will provide support to the Stage Gate process by:

• Preparing objective, data-driven gate review packages for each stage gate decision point by validating and assembling the cost, schedule, risk, and scope evidence prepared by project teams that reviewers use to determine whether a project is ready to advance to the next phase.
• Maintaining project status tracking across the stage-gated portfolio, including milestone adherence, cost trending, and scope change history.
• Assisting project teams in developing Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) that provide the structure…