Role Description

The Chemical Process Engineer Lead (Plant Support) is a primary resource to optimize plant operations, resolve plant problems and enable safe production. The Chemical Process Engineering Lead works as a member of the plant support team ensuring excellence in safety, quality, operations, and maintenance. The role provides a technical direction to assist process engineering teams on daily performance improvements, equipment modifications, and upgrades, and new product qualifications and trials. The position requires that the Engineer be available to assist whenever unexpected downtime or yield losses occur.

The Chemical Process Engineer Lead (Plant Support) is a primary resource to optimize plant operations, resolve plant problems and enable safe production. The Chemical Process Engineering Lead works as a member of the plant support team ensuring excellence in safety, quality, operations, and maintenance. The role provides a technical direction to assist process engineering teams on daily performance improvements, equipment modifications, and upgrades, and new product qualifications and trials. The position requires that the Engineer be available to assist whenever unexpected downtime or yield losses occur.

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record in engineering leadership as well as the ability to develop standard engineering practices and provide detailed documentation upon work completion. This person will be site chemical process technical lead and provide project management activities, as required.

This position requires a high degree of technical skill level and chemical background. Participation in all aspects of process support will be required: new process implementation; value improvement optimization; safety evaluation; in-depth troubleshooting; formal Corrective Action Preventative Action (CAPA) evaluation and implementation; and process control planning. The Process Engineering team works with an extremely varied chemical portfolio including specialty organic chemicals; organic resins and adhesives; polymer materials; inorganic glasses, minerals, and composites; and pharmaceuticals. Production scale is small to moderate, allowing for rapid product introduction and frequent innovation. Work will be performed within an FDA/ISO regulated facility requiring the development and execution of appropriate validation/qualification protocols.

The Plant Support Process Engineering team is responsible for the efficient operation of all chemical products in two manufacturing plants. We evaluate existing manufacturing operations; establish procedures to gain optimum utilization of equipment; review production requirements; and recommend process improvements.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provides leadership and direction in the day to day decision making for the operating area of responsibility, and monitors and intervenes with plant operators to meet quality and production targets.
• Able to effectively lead optimization activities and ongoing process improvement initiatives, including projects for EH&S compliance, reliability, capacity, process consistency, quality and cost reduction.
• Work closely with all disciplines, troubleshooting problems, to ensure plant processes are aligned to provide maximum output levels and efficiencies.
• Continuously evaluate equipment, process operations and controls to ensure personnel safety, environmental stewardship and regulatory compliance.
• Optimize production by conducting tests, monitoring performances, and compiling de-bottleneck studies to identify cost-saving opportunities.
• Has expert knowledge of the manufacturing process, products and technology, and works with Process Engineers and the Technology Transfer Center to ensure that equipment is performing to design specification.
• Participates in root cause investigations and advanced troubleshooting and coaches others to learn these skills.
• Initiate, develop and execute validation/qualification protocols to support business/operational initiatives including customer backorder minimization, cost reduction, non-conformance reduction, complaint reduction, yield/process reliability improvement, and FDA/ISO compliance requirements.
• Investigate and implement corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs) to meet business and compliance requirements.
• Develop Value Stream Maps or Process Maps to identify improvement opportunities for Safety, Quality, Delivery and Cost
• Apply a wide range of Lean, Six Sigma methods and tools to develop and implement process improvements
• Other duties as assigned.
• Some travel may be required (<10%).