Senior Reliability Engineer

Lewiston is Clearwater Paper’s original manufacturing facility and home to nearly 700 dedicated team members who power our site. Together, we make paperboard used in products across the United States, including food packaging, plates, cups and more. The site currently operates two paper machines, two extruders, two power boilers and two recovery boilers.

Located where the Snake and Clearwater rivers meet on the Idaho-Washington border, Lewiston offers an active outdoor lifestyle with easy access to fishing, boating, hiking and camping. The region’s climate features milder winters and long sunny summers. Living here means you’ll be close to Lewis-Clark State College, University of Idaho, Washington State University, and Walla Walla Community College, as well as strong local K–12 school districts.

The Senior Reliability Engineer is responsible for managing the facilities power distribution systems and associated assets and helping to drive improvement in all areas of the mill.

• Project & Operations Support
• Work as a liaison between Maintenance, Operations, and Engineering teams
• Work as a strategic partner in the electrical and instrumentation department primarily in failure prevention and long-term support
• Provide technical assistance to production, reliability and quality groups as needed to solve equipment and process-related problems and develop methods to improve processes
• Assist E&I Maintenance Supervisors and Planners with technical maintenance issues
• Optimize manufacturing processes by investigating and eliminating root causes of equipment failures
• MOC Champion to review, lead, or assist as needed

• Reliability
• Work with condition monitoring program to reduce RED’s list (Vibration, IR, etc.)
• Work with system analysis tools and vendors to improve power quality
• Support site power system study and model updates (Relay Protection, Easy Power Model, etc.)
• Perform BDA/RCA/RCFA/5-Whys/defect elimination on contributors of yield, utilization, and capacity losses due to failures attributed to equipment or processes
• Identify and resolve chronic failures (bad actors) through BDA/RCA/RCFA/5-Whys/defect elimination
• Establish and monitor predictive maintenance program (PM Optimization)
• Calculate asset life-cycle costs on bad actors
• Perform criticality analysis work
• Work with other disciplines within the reliability team to update and improve the current criticality model
• Define critical spares and BOMs as needed
• Verify critical spare list is updated annually; work with engineering to verify BOMs are in place after commissioning
• Conduct asset risk/health analysis
• Create and update assets within JDE (as needed)
• Create low voltage PM scope for major outage annually
• Include MCC, emergency generators, switch gear, UPS systems, transformers, and battery backups
• Work with electrical and instrumentation crews to improve workflow follow-up
• Maintain transformer health assessments and optimizations
• Develop/update Switching Orders – Standard/Non-Standard LOTO

• Leadership
• Assist in managing the Predictive and Preventative Maintenance programs including vibration coverage, plant tank integrity, pressure vessel integrity, and pre-post failure reports
• Work as a strategic partner in the electrical and instrumentation department primarily in failure prevention and long-term support
• Weekend Duty and overtime as needed; attend weekend status update meetings and provide onsite support as required
• Manages capital projects as required
• Facilitate Reliability Steering Teams
• Allocate decision-making authority or task responsibility to appropriate individuals based on abilities, availability, motivation and development needs
• Possess strong troubleshooting skills
• Understand power distribution systems and major components
• Understand protection and coordinated trip settings
• Prior experience with electrical diagnostics – IR Thermography, partial discharge, power quality analysis
• Prior experience with medium and low voltage drives
• Provide relevant options for addressing problems and opportunities to achieve desired outcomes
• Systematically evaluate business opportunities for positive impact

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering required
• 7+…