Director of Manufacturing Engineering & Reliability

Company Overview Stella-Jones is a leading manufacturer of essential infrastructure products focused on serving utilities and railroads, as well as supplying big box home improvement stores across North America. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada and publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Stella-Jones operates a vast network of facilities that employs more than 3,000 employees across the United States and Canada. Built on strong foundations with a coast-to-coast reach, we offer real opportunities for career success and community impact.

Position Overview The Director of Manufacturing Engineering & Reliability is a senior, working leader responsible for establishing a new enterprise capability that elevates how Stella-Jones plants operate, maintain critical assets, integrate capital improvements, and adopt future-ready operational technologies. This is an operations-facing engineering role focused on the physical performance, process reliability, equipment capability, and infrastructure across our North American manufacturing network.

It is not a product design, product development, or laboratory R&D position. The Director serves as the technical engine of the Operational Innovation & Excellence Center (OIEC), identifying constraints on the plant floor and turning them into practical, sustainable engineering solutions. Because this is a brand-new role and function, success will not come from managing an established department, but from building an operating model from the ground up.

The Director must lead through a complex matrix (partnering with Plant Leadership, Operations, Maintenance, the PMO, IT/OT, and external engineering firms) establishing consensus on standards where none exist today, creating momentum amid ambiguity, and remaining directly accountable for field-level operational impact. This position can be based remotely anywhere in the continental United States, ideally near a major commercial airport to accommodate regular travel (up to 60%) across our North American manufacturing network.

Candidates residing near a Stella-Jones corporate office (including Lenexa, Kansas, Montreal QC, etc) or near a manufacturing location are also welcome to operate on a hybrid schedule.

Core Responsibilities The Director will drive five core pillars that connect day-to-day plant realities with enterprise strategy:
1. Engineering Process & Equipment Optimization

• Translate plant floor bottlenecks into high-value engineering solutions that improve throughput, safety, and operating margins across treating, material handling, and utilities.
• Process & Bottleneck Engineering:
  Partnering to analyze operational workflows, chemical treating processes, drying cycles, and yard material flow to eliminate constraints and reduce cycle times.
• Equipment & Facility Capability:
  Evaluate industrial equipment condition, capability, obsolescence, and total cost of ownership; formulate sound engineering alternatives for retrofits, replacements, or capacity debottlenecking.
• Engineering-Led Continuous Improvement:
  Apply disciplined problem-solving and CI methodologies with deep engineering rigor, ensuring process modifications are technically sound, safe, and adopted into standard operating procedures.
• Repeatable Solutions:
  Identify high-impact solutions at one facility and adapt them across the network, accounting for unique plant layouts and regional operating contexts.
• Asset Reliability & Maintenance Strategy
• Build the enterprise reliability framework and technical foundation needed to shift facilities from reactive repairs to predictive asset health, in close partnership with plant maintenance.
• Reliability Capability Building:
  Develop and roll out consensus-based reliability frameworks, introducing asset criticality modeling, bad-actor resolution, and lifecycle asset management to plants across the enterprise.
• Maintenance System Standards:
  Identify opportunities to establish practical corporate methodologies for preventive/predictive maintenance (PM/PdM), condition monitoring, vibration/oil analysis, and critical spares philosophy without overburdening plant personnel.
• Chronic Failure Elimination:
  Act as the senior technical resource for plants facing recurring equipment failures, facilitating structured root-cause analysis (RCA) and permanent corrective redesigns.
• Field Partnership & Transition:
  Respect plant autonomy, day-to-day maintenance execution remains with local plant teams, while…