Engineering And Maintenance Manager

Zina's Fine Foods is a refrigerated food manufacturer in South Plainfield, New Jersey. We make ready-to-eat salads, side dishes and prepared meals for national and regional retailers, and we are growing faster than our plant was built for. We are hiring a Maintenance & Engineering Manager. You will report directly to the President and own the engineering function outright. There is no engineering layer above you and no corporate group to defer to. You decide what gets fixed, what gets bought, what gets automated and in what order. Your team You will lead a small in-house team covering controls, mechanical repair and facilities. You decide what each of them works on, week by week, and you are accountable for whether their time produced anything. You also direct our outside vendors for refrigeration, electrical and specialty service work. Running the plant • Own the PM program, the asset register and the spare parts you actually need on the shelf • Be first to a breakdown, not third. You diagnose across mechanical, electrical, pneumatic and controls, and you still put your hands on the machine • Find the recurring failures, fix the cause, and stop us paying for the same repair twice • Set the machine parameters and changeover standards our operators follow • Keep uptime honest with numbers you trust Equipment you will work with Cookers and chillers, mixers, fillers and depositors, labelers, checkweighers, metal detectors, conveyors, tray sealers and packaging lines, plus the compressed air, glycol, steam and refrigeration behind them. Not all of it came with documentation, and part of the job is making that equipment as reliable as the rest. Capital projects and automation • Tell us what to buy and what not to buy. We would rather hear "not yet" with a reason than spend the money twice • Assess what we already own and say honestly what should be rebuilt, replaced or run to failure • Find the suppliers, write the specification, get the quotes, compare them on real numbers and pick • Decide where machinery goes so the workflow, the sanitation and the people all work • Size what the line needs: power, air, water, drains, refrigeration load • Run factory acceptance testing and site acceptance testing yourself, and refuse to sign off on equipment that does not perform • Build the automation roadmap: what we automate first, what it costs, what it returns • Tell us when the answer is another person rather than another machine Engineering judgment and the limits of it You will do the calculations behind our decisions. Where the work needs a licensed Professional Engineer's seal, permit drawings, structural capacity, service upgrades, you scope it, hire the firm and manage them. We expect you to know exactly where that line falls. Compliance Lockout/tagout, machine guarding, electrical safety and contractor control are yours. Our equipment and our maintenance practices have to hold up to GMP, HACCP and SQF, and to customer audits with little notice.