Reliability Engineer

Coeur Rochester is an open-pit, heap-leach silver and gold operation in Lovelock, Nevada. The mine is Coeur’s largest expansion investment project in its 95-year history, targeting a tripling of production rates from historical levels. Rochester has the largest silver reserve asset in the United States and employs approximately 450 engineers, geologists, front-line operators, and business leaders. The site prioritizes safety, teamwork, career development, and growth.

About the role

The Reliability Engineer – Mobile Equipment Maintenance is responsible for improving the safety, reliability, availability, maintainability, and lifecycle cost of mining equipment and supporting infrastructure at the Rochester Mine. This field-based role reports to the Mobile Maintenance Superintendent and provides hands-on engineering support to Maintenance and Operations.

The Rochester fleet includes a Komatsu PC4000 and Hitachi 2600 face shovels, three CAT 994K loaders, twenty-six CAT 789 haul trucks, two CAT 6250 drills, two DML drills, one Epiroc 235 Viper drill, six CAT D10 dozers, and miscellaneous support vehicles.

Responsibilities

• Monitor and evaluate the health and performance of mobile mining equipment and selected fixed assets.
• Identify chronic failures, repeat defects, excessive component consumption, and high-cost equipment using maintenance, operating, and condition-monitoring data.
• Track and analyze equipment availability, utilization, mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), maintenance cost, component life, and unscheduled downtime.
• Develop equipment reliability improvement plans based on operational risk, failure history, production impact, and lifecycle cost.
• Maintain bad-actor equipment lists and facilitate recurring reviews with Maintenance and Operations.
• Evaluate whether reliability improvements produce sustained results after implementation.
• Lead root cause analyses for significant equipment failures, repeat failures, safety-related defects, and production-loss events.
• Gather physical evidence, operating data, fluid samples, inspection findings, work history, photographs, and employee observations during investigations.
• Develop corrective actions addressing physical, human, procedural, design, and organizational causes.
• Assign action owners, establish due dates, monitor completion, and verify the effectiveness of corrective actions.
• Communicate investigation findings in clear technical reports and presentations.
• Develop and optimize preventive, predictive, and condition-based maintenance strategies.
• Review preventive maintenance tasks for effectiveness, duplication, excessive frequency, missing tasks, and opportunities for condition-based maintenance.
• Support asset criticality assessments and risk-based maintenance prioritization.
• Facilitate maintenance strategy reviews using reliability-centered maintenance and failure-mode-based principles.
• Ensure maintenance tasks clearly define the failure mode being managed, the required action, and the expected standard.
• Recommend changes to maintenance intervals based on condition data, failure history, operating environment, and OEM guidance.
• Support job-plan development by identifying technical requirements, tolerances, inspection points, and quality-control steps.
• Support or manage condition-monitoring technologies applicable to mine equipment, including:
  • Lubricant and wear-debris analysis
  • Vibration analysis
  • Infrared thermography
  • Ultrasound
  • Equipment inspections
  • Filtration and contamination-control monitoring
  • Telematics and onboard equipment data
  • Payload, temperature, pressure, and event data
• Review condition-monitoring alerts and ensure actionable findings are converted into planned maintenance work.
• Improve sampling locations, sampling practices, alarm limits, inspection routes, and data quality.
• Work with maintenance personnel to confirm defects in the field and determine the appropriate response.
• Evaluate new condition-monitoring technologies and develop business cases for implementation.
• Monitor alert-to-work-order conversion, defect closure, and equipment condition after repairs.
• Support the site lubrication management program for mobile and fixed equipment.
• Review lubricant selection, storage, transfer, filtration, dispensing, sampling, and disposal practices.
• Establish or improve contamination-control targets for hydraulic, powertrain, fuel, and lubrication systems.
• Investigate abnormal wear metals, viscosity changes, coolant contamination, fuel dilution, water ingress, oxidation, and particle-count trends.
• Recommend improvements such as offline filtration, high-efficiency breathers, desiccant breathers, improved sampling ports, sealed transfer systems, and filtration upgrades.
• Work with Maintenance, Warehouse, and suppliers to prevent lubricant misapplication and cross-contamination.
• Develop standards for fluid cleanliness during component installation and system commissioning.
• Maintain and validate downtime reporting database and KPIs.
• Drive the predictive and preventative maintenance process, including data translation and analysis (including report generation).
• Identify, evaluate, and scope reliability improvement opportunities.
• Collaborate with management teams and key partners in the development of budgets as well as production and shutdown plans.
• Conduct reliability analysis and improvements (analyzing trends, critical metrics – MTTR, MTBF, FFPM, data analysis, bad actor failure analysis and optimization).
• Lead the use of improvement processes to improve the performance of assets.
• Actively coach and train condition monitoring and lubrication technicians.
• Ensure efficient and reliable operations of mine equipment while protecting and prolonging the economic life of all assets.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering.
• Five (5+) years of demonstrated experience in mine equipment maintenance or a comparable heavy industrial environment.
• Experience with reliability tools (UT, Thermography, CBM, Oil analysis interpretation, RCA, KPI metrics analysis, developing asset services strategies).
• Ability to analyze work order history, downtime, maintenance costs, component life, and equipment performance data.
• Experience with Excel, Cat SIS, and oil analysis interpretation.
• Ability to read and interpret technical manuals, engineering drawings, hydraulic schematics, electrical diagrams, and equipment specifications.
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills.
• Strong analytical, planning, organizational, and time management skills.
• Software skills in MS Office products and CMMS systems (Oracle), Edge, Dingo Trakka, Oil commander, VIMS/VHMS.
• Self-starter with a high-performance attitude.
• Self-motivated, with good work ethics and a strong attitude towards safety.
• Ability to work safely and efficiently in a team environment.

Benefits

• Relocation available for certain positions.
• Competitive Annual Incentive Bonus (AIP).
• Full benefits starting on day 1 (medical, vision, dental, employee assistance program, Teladoc service).
• 6% dollar-for-dollar employer match to 401k or Roth, with immediate vesting.
• Travel pay for those outside of bus service.