Maintenance Director – Operational Readiness Team; ORT), Rare Earth Elements; REE

Maintenance Director – Operational Readiness Team (ORT), Rare Earth Elements (REE)

Job Location:

Riyadh, KSA

Employment Type:

Full-time

The Maintenance Director – ORT will lead all maintenance-readiness activities for the REE project, working throughout design, engineering, construction, commissioning, startup, and ramp-up to ensure the plant is fully prepared for safe, reliable, and maintainable operation. The role will embed maintenance requirements early in project development and establish the people, systems, tools, and support model required to operate and maintain the asset effectively.

The position requires proven experience in REE processing projects and strong practical exposure to design review, maintenance strategy development, commissioning support, asset care systems, reliability, spare parts readiness, contractor planning, and handover into live operations. Uranium processing or project experience is a strong plus.

• Represent maintenance and reliability requirements during concept, FEED, detailed design, construction, pre-commissioning, commissioning, startup, and early operations.
• Ensure plant design supports maintainability, access, lifting, isolation, operability, safety, equipment protection, and long-term asset integrity.
• Develop the maintenance operating model, organization structure, manpower plan, and shift coverage required for startup and steady-state operation.
• Define and implement the maintenance strategy, including preventive, predictive, condition-based, statutory, and turnaround maintenance requirements.
• Lead readiness for CMMS/EAM, maintenance master data, equipment hierarchy, BOMs, PM plans, criticality ranking, and spare-parts catalogs.
• Establish spare-parts philosophy and ensure critical spares, consumables, tools, workshops, contracts, and vendor support are in place before startup.
• Recruit, onboard, and develop the required maintenance workforce and technical specialists to operate and maintain the plant safely and effectively.
• Support commissioning, performance testing, troubleshooting, and ramp-up with strong focus on reliability, equipment availability, and product-quality stability.

• Review layouts, equipment selection, access provisions, cranes, monorails, maintainability clearances, isolation points, and utility arrangements from a maintenance perspective.
• Challenge design choices that may increase downtime, maintenance cost, safety risk, or complexity during plant operation.
• Work with project, EPCM, OEMs, and engineering teams to ensure O&M manuals, drawings, recommended spares, special tools, and vendor support requirements are contractually secured.

• Build the maintenance-readiness roadmap, milestones, checklists, stage-gates, and assurance metrics for project-to-operations transition.
• Set up maintenance workflows for work management, planning and scheduling, shutdowns, equipment history, lubrication, inspection, calibration interface, and defect elimination.
• Lead readiness for CMMS/EAM implementation, data quality, asset registers, maintenance coding, and integration with operations, warehouse, and procurement systems.

• Develop asset criticality, risk-based maintenance logic, reliability strategy, and bad-actor management for key REE plant systems.
• Ensure asset-integrity controls are in place for rotating equipment, piping, tanks, vessels, reagent systems, utilities, and corrosion-sensitive areas.
• Support development of condition-monitoring, vibration, lubrication, thermography, and inspection programs as applicable.

• Define the maintenance organization structure, role descriptions, manpower numbers, contractor philosophy, and competency requirements.
• Lead recruitment planning for maintenance leaders, planners, reliability engineers, supervisors, technicians, and specialist support roles.
• Ensure training plans, OEM/vendor training, qualification matrices, and startup competency assessments are completed before handover.

• Support…