RELIABILITY & MECHANICAL ENGINEER

Our client is a global leader in caramel colors and specialty caramel ingredients, with more than 100 years of innovation serving the world's leading food and beverage brands! Their portfolio includes clean-label caramel colors, burnt sugars, syrups, and specialty ingredients found in countless products consumers enjoy every day. With a reputation for quality, technical excellence, and continuous innovation, they continue to invest in their people, technology, and manufacturing operations!

We are looking for a Reliability & Mechanical Engineer to support reliability, optimization, and continuous improvement of equipment used in food ingredient manufacturing. This role will work closely with operations, maintenance, and engineering teams to improve equipment performance, assist with capital projects, and ensure mechanical systems meet sanitary design and food safety standards. This position is ideal for an engineer who enjoys solving real-world manufacturing problems, improving equipment performance, and working directly on production systems.

What You’ll Do:

• Improve reliability and performance of industrial production equipment such as steam batch reactors, powder dryers, evaporators, heat exchangers, conveyors, and packaging systems.
• Design heating, cooling, and fluid-handling systems (steam, HX’s, pumps, piping) for cooking, drying, and transferring.
• Design building modifications, tank foundations, pipe chase / mounting systems, cat walks, etc. for structural approval and work with contractors to ensure specifications are followed.
• Troubleshoot mechanical failures and lead root cause analysis to reduce downtime.
• Support capital improvement projects including equipment specification, vendor coordination, installation, and commissioning.
• Develop and update mechanical drawings and documentation using tools such as AutoCAD.
• Partner with maintenance and operations teams to implement preventive and predictive maintenance improvements.
• Identify opportunities to increase throughput, improve efficiency, and reduce operational risk.
• Ensure equipment and designs meet regulatory and food safety standards from the Food and Drug Administration and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points.
• Collaborate with automation teams working with control platforms from companies such as Rockwell Automation.
• Provide flexible, cross‑functional support to the engineering team, taking on a variety of technical and non‑technical tasks as project needs evolve.

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
• Experience in manufacturing or industrial environments.
• Experience troubleshooting and improving mechanical equipment.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with operations, maintenance, and engineering teams.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.

Preferred:

• Experience in food, beverage, ingredient, pharmaceutical, or other regulated manufacturing environments.
• Familiarity with powder or bulk ingredient handling systems.
• Knowledge of sanitary equipment design.
• Lean manufacturing or Six Sigma experience.

Base salary range: $85,000 - $125,000 commensurate with experience and qualifications, plus bonus opportunity and excellent benefits!
This compensation range reflects the company's expectations for this position at the time of posting. Actual pay will be determined based on factors such as relevant experience, alignment with role responsibilities, education, demonstrated skills, and performance during the interview process