Maintenance Director – Operational Readiness Team (ORT), Rare Earth Elements (REE)

Position: Maintenance Director – Operational Readiness Team (ORT), Rare Earth Elements (REE)

Job Location: Riyadh, KSA

Employment Type: Full-time

Industry: MINING

The Maintenance Director – ORT will lead all maintenance-readiness activities for the REE project, working throughout design, engineering, construction, commissioning, startup, and ramp-up to ensure the plant is fully prepared for safe, reliable, and maintainable operation. The role will embed maintenance requirements early in project development and establish the people, systems, tools, and support model required to operate and maintain the asset effectively.

The position requires proven experience in REE processing projects and strong practical exposure to design review, maintenance strategy development, commissioning support, asset care systems, reliability, spare parts readiness, contractor planning, and handover into live operations. Uranium processing or project experience is a strong plus.

Key Accountabilities

•Represent maintenance and reliability requirements during concept, FEED, detailed design, construction, pre-commissioning, commissioning, startup, and early operations.

•Ensure plant design supports maintainability, access, lifting, isolation, operability, safety, equipment protection, and long-term asset integrity.

•Develop the maintenance operating model, organization structure, manpower plan, and shift coverage required for startup and steady-state operation.

•Define and implement the maintenance strategy, including preventive, predictive, condition-based, statutory, and turnaround maintenance requirements.

•Lead readiness for CMMS/EAM, maintenance master data, equipment hierarchy, BOMs, PM plans, criticality ranking, and spare-parts catalogs.

•Establish spare-parts philosophy and ensure critical spares, consumables, tools, workshops, contracts, and vendor support are in place before startup.

•Recruit, onboard, and develop the required maintenance workforce and technical specialists to operate and maintain the plant safely and effectively.

•Support commissioning, performance testing, troubleshooting, and ramp-up with strong focus on reliability, equipment availability, and product-quality stability.

Detailed Responsibilities

1.Design and Construction Involvement

•Review layouts, equipment selection, access provisions, cranes, monorails, maintainability clearances, isolation points, and utility arrangements from a maintenance perspective.

•Challenge design choices that may increase downtime, maintenance cost, safety risk, or complexity during plant operation.

•Work with project, EPCM, OEMs, and engineering teams to ensure O&M manuals, drawings, recommended spares, special tools, and vendor support requirements are contractually secured.

2. Maintenance Readiness and Systems

•Build the maintenance-readiness roadmap, milestones, checklists, stage-gates, and assurance metrics for project-to-operations transition.

•Set up maintenance workflows for work management, planning and scheduling, shutdowns, equipment history, lubrication, inspection, calibration interface, and defect elimination.

•Lead readiness for CMMS/EAM implementation, data quality, asset registers, maintenance coding, and integration with operations, warehouse, and procurement systems.

3. Reliability and Asset Integrity

•Develop asset criticality, risk-based maintenance logic, reliability strategy, and bad-actor management for key REE plant systems.

•Ensure asset-integrity controls are in place for rotating equipment, piping, tanks, vessels, reagent systems, utilities, and corrosion-sensitive areas.

•Support development of condition-monitoring, vibration, lubrication, thermography, and inspection programs as applicable.

4. Resource Planning and Capability Building

•Define the maintenance organization structure, role descriptions, manpower numbers, contractor philosophy, and competency requirements.

•Lead recruitment planning for maintenance leaders, planners, reliability engineers, supervisors, technicians, and specialist support roles.

•Ensure training plans, OEM/vendor training, qualification matrices, and startup competency assessments are completed before handover.

5. Commissioning, Startup, and Ramp-up Support

•Support pre-commissioning, commissioning, startup, and early-life reliability improvement activities.

•Ensure punch-list priorities, equipment preservation closeout, lubrication readiness, alignments, baseline inspections, and initial PM routines are completed.

•Support stable ramp-up by reducing repeat failures, improving mean time between failures, and enabling reliable production without avoidable quality disruption.

Minimum Experience:

•Experience - 20+ years in maintenance, reliability, commissioning, or plant operations within minerals processing, hydrometallurgy, or complex chemical-process industries.

•Essential Sector Exposure-Direct experience in Rare Earth Elements projects or operations, with proven involvement from design through commissioning, startup, and operating support.

•Preferred Experience - Exposure to beneficiation, leaching, purification, solvent extraction, precipitation, calcination, utilities, reagent systems, and product handling in REE plants.

•Additional Advantage-Uranium processing or uranium-project maintenance experience is a strong plus.

High Performance Competencies:

•Maintenance organization, systems, spares, and support contracts ready before commissioning.

•Safe and efficient startup with reduced equipment failures and fewer avoidable maintenance-related delays.

•High-quality handover from project to operations with complete documentation, data, and trained teams.

•Reliable ramp-up supported by strong asset availability, defect elimination, and disciplined work management.