Reliability Engineer

About the Role

The Reliability Engineer is responsible for improving equipment reliability, eliminating chronic losses, and stabilizing production assets through engineering-led maintenance strategies. This role sits within the Maintenance Department and serves as the technical owner of loss elimination, defining asset reliability strategies and standards to transition the plant from reactive to preventive and predictive maintenance. Working closely with Maintenance and Operations, this position ensures asset strategies and improvements permanently eliminate failure modes impacting Safety, Quality, Production, and Cost. The role focuses on defining and driving reliability strategy and is not responsible for day-to-day maintenance execution.

Responsibilities

• Identify and prioritize chronic losses and bad actor assets using downtime, cost, and defect data
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and implement permanent solutions to eliminate repeat failures
• Develop and maintain reliability strategies for critical equipment
• Use data to validate improvements and track results
• Drive prioritization of reliability efforts based on business impact (Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery)
• Ensure solutions are sustained through standards, PMs, and procedures
• Define and optimize maintenance strategies (PM, PdM, run-to-failure) based on failure modes and asset criticality
• Improve PM effectiveness through failure-mode-driven tasks
• Drive continuous improvement of maintenance plans using CMMS data and feedback
• Eliminate non-value-added PMs and improve maintenance efficiency
• Ensure maintenance strategies prevent repeat failures
• Develop SMPs and standards
• Work directly on the plant floor to validate failures and root causes
• Coach maintenance and operations teams in RCA and reliability thinking
• Partner with Operations to reduce misuse and avoidable losses
• Support implementation of practical, sustainable improvements
• Support capital projects related to fixed equipment, process improvement, utilities, and facilities
• Apply structured improvement methodologies (TPM/WCM, focused improvement)
• Embed reliability improvements into daily operations
• Collaborate across Engineering, Maintenance, Quality, and Operations
• Maintain reliability data to support decision-making
• Apply condition monitoring techniques (vibration, thermography, oil analysis)
• Support development of predictive maintenance strategies
• Use data and analytics to improve asset performance

Key Deliverables

• Reduce downtime and improve asset reliability (MTBF / MTTR / BD%, PMs)
• Eliminate chronic failures and bad actors
• Improve effectiveness of maintenance strategies
• Deliver sustained improvements through data
• Increase capability of maintenance and operations teams

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering: Mechanical, Chemical, or equivalent
• 5+ years of related experience in FMCG, chemical, oil & gas, pharmaceutical, or automotive industry
• Strong understanding of maintenance and reliability fundamentals (breakdown analysis, failure modes, RCA, FMEA, bad-actor analysis)
• Experience using data to drive decisions
• Experience with preventive and predictive maintenance
• Familiarity with CMMS systems
• CAD experience (e.g., SolidWorks, AutoCAD)
• 3D printing or rapid prototyping experience
• Condition monitoring and predictive maintenance experience
• Experience using digital tools or analytics

Pay

The pay range for this position is $88,600 to $133,000. Unilever takes into consideration a wide range of factors that are utilized in making compensation decisions including, but not limited to, skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, qualifications and education, and other business and organizational needs.

This position is bonus eligible and also eligible for Long-Term Incentive (LTI).