Maintenance Manager
- Waterford
- Permanent
- Full-time
Full-Time | PermanentHartley People Recruitment is seeking a proactive and experienced Maintenance Manager to support an established manufacturing site in Waterford. This is a key leadership opportunity for an individual with strong maintenance, facilities, and engineering project experience, ideally in a food or high-volume manufacturing environment.The successful candidate will lead the maintenance function to achieve site and group KPIs, covering planned and preventative maintenance, breakdown response, cost control, and project management. This role requires the ability to coach, motivate, and develop a large engineering team while driving initiatives to improve plant reliability, safety, and performance. A high level of ownership and a solutions mindset are essential.Duties and Responsibilities:
- Deliver key business objectives and performance targets for the site maintenance function.
- Monitor and control maintenance budgets, ensuring spend is authorised in line with site and group policies.
- Provide leadership, coaching, and direction to the site maintenance team, overseeing time-critical repairs and troubleshooting.
- Manage day-to-day maintenance activities, including prioritising and scheduling tasks to minimise production disruption.
- Plan scheduled maintenance work while responding effectively to unforeseen breakdowns and equipment issues.
- Optimise the use of internal resources and third-party contractors depending on skill set, capability, and availability.
- Manage third-party contracts, ensuring value, service-level agreements, and contractor performance are aligned with business needs.
- Develop and implement proactive maintenance strategies to improve plant reliability, personnel effectiveness, and production process stability.
- Support motivation, training, and development initiatives to enhance employee engagement within the maintenance team.
- Oversee and manage all site utilities (e.g. electricity, water, air, refrigeration), ensuring continuity and quality of services.
- Promote initiatives to improve engineering performance, cost control, and continuous improvement.
- Ensure compliance with all safety, quality, and GMP standards across maintenance operations.
- Other duties as may reasonably be assigned in line with evolving company needs.
- 5+ years’ recent experience in a similar leadership role within a maintenance or engineering environment, ideally in food or high-volume manufacturing
- Time-served trades qualification or third-level qualification in a mechanical or electrical discipline
- Demonstrated experience managing a large maintenance or engineering team
- Proven ability to deliver large-scale projects in a complex industrial and technical environment, with knowledge of project management techniques
- Excellent communication, leadership, and interpersonal skills
- Strong people-management capability, with a track record of motivating and mentoring teams
- Highly motivated, proactive, and able to multitask in a dynamic setting
- Strong IT literacy