Continuous Improvement Sr. Engineering Lead

Continuous Improvement Sr. Engineering Lead

DuPont has an exciting and challenging opportunity for an Operational Excellence and Senior Engineering leader at the Spray Polyurethane Foam site located in Wilmington, Illinois. This site employs approximately 150 people and is about 60 miles southwest of downtown Chicago. The site is the flagship for the production of GREAT STUFF™ and other spray foam construction materials.

• Provides administrative leadership, coaching, and career development for direct reports.
• Demonstrates strong field presence and involvement in shop floor audits.
• Creates an environment that fosters team and individual empowerment throughout the organization.
• Recognizes personnel for both behavior and performance.
• Ensures implementation and effectiveness of work processes, operating discipline, management systems, enabling technologies, and roles.
• Leads the plant level improvement process by gathering and analyzing data, evaluating improvement opportunities, and implementing improvement projects to close performance gaps and increase manufacturing capability.
• Validates, consolidates, and prioritizes plant improvement opportunities and aligns them to the Business Technology Implementation Plan and business objectives.
• Sets site reliability strategy and drives implementation through cross‑functional teams.
• Tracks progress as needed in global reporting tools.
• Implements improvement projects in reliability, process safety, and to improve plant performance.
• Works with the Run Plant Engineers and Reliability Specialist in collection and analysis of improvement project results data to validate projects that deliver sustained performance objectives after implementation.
• Promotes and champions Continuous Improvement/LEAN initiatives at the plant, leveraging DuPont subject matter experts as needed.
• Provides technical expertise on all matters of reliability engineering, assessment and monitoring for all process equipment (including mechanical, electrical and instrument/control equipment).
• Applies engineering theory, practices, and principles to perform physical failure analysis, determine root cause of equipment failures and conduct equipment performance evaluations.
• Analyzes equipment trends, historical data, and field data to recommend and justify improvements to obtain lowest life cycle cost for equipment, maximize production, and reduce process variation.
• Participates in reliability networks and shares best practices, successes, and failures.
• Serves as MIQA Leader for the site PSM program and participates in PSM activities as defined by site manuals and practices, mainly focused in mechanical integrity and quality assurance.
• Interacts with Business Engineering Leaders, Manufacturing Technology organization, and Site Leader to create and execute capital plans (typically $1MM‑$3MM/yr).
• Works closely with the site, Manufacturing Technology organization, and Cap Ex resources to execute FEL engineering activities.
• Leads the team in identifying non‑cap or more effective alternatives, following best practices, conducting risk analysis, and developing mitigating plans.
• Drives project execution and coaches site team on the DuPont Global Project Execution Methodology (GPS) work process.
• Supports capital projects by participating in setting equipment specifications to optimize reliability and life cycle cost.
• Provides technical support for QA/QC, installation, and start‑up of all new critical equipment.

• Excellent communication skills.
• Strong organizational and influential leadership and interpersonal skills.
• Experience in managing the deliverables needed to prepare project estimates and schedules.
• Prior experience improving performance and capability.
• Bias for execution, results‑oriented, and demonstrated courage.
• Knowledge of maintenance and reliability best practices, rotating equipment and alignment techniques, materials science, physical failure analysis.
• Power and electrical knowledge; instrumentation and process control.
• Predictive techniques for fixed and rotating equipment and instrumentation (vibration analysis, tribology, non‑destructive testing, thermography).
• Understanding of…