Maintenance and Reliability Manager

About Ingredion:

Join Ingredion, where innovation impacts lives worldwide! Without even realizing it, you’ve experienced our work in your favorite chocolate, your pet’s food, the paper you write on, and your everyday snacks. As a global powerhouse across more than 60 industries, we harness the potential of natural ingredients to transform lives. Whether you’re just starting your career or bringing years of experience, there's a place for you here to make a real difference. Be part of our team that values a wide range of perspectives and is committed to shaping a better world with every product we create.

Location: North Kansas City, MO plant

Workplace type: On Site

Ingredion is seeking a strategic and hands-on Maintenance & Reliability Manager to lead the performance, reliability, and continuous improvement of critical production assets at its North Kansas City facility. This leader will oversee maintenance execution, reliability engineering, and asset management strategies that drive safe, reliable, and cost-effective operations while advancing a culture of operational excellence. The ideal candidate combines strong technical expertise with proven leadership capabilities, leveraging data-driven decision-making, continuous improvement methodologies, and cross-functional collaboration to improve asset performance, optimize maintenance processes, and deliver sustainable business results. As a key member of the plant leadership team, this role will develop organizational capability, champion change, and lead reliability initiatives that enhance safety, quality, productivity, and long-term operational success.

As a Maintenance and Reliability Manager, you will lead the Maintenance & Reliability organization for the Production Unit, ensuring production assets safely and reliably perform their required functions through excellent maintenance execution, effective reliability engineering, and disciplined work management. Integrate maintenance execution, asset strategy, and continuous improvement to deliver sustainable improvements in availability, reliability, maintenance cost, and organizational capability.

This role reports to the North Kansas City Plant Manager and oversees a team of 3 directly and forty indirectly.

What you will do: 

• Lead implementation and long-term sustainability of the Ingredion Performance System, including governance, audits, action plans, and performance measurement.
• Standardize operational KPIs, best practices, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement processes to drive business results.
• Develop and execute reliability and maintenance strategies for critical assets, ensuring safe, reliable, and cost-effective operations.
• Optimize asset management systems and data analytics, including CMMS (SAP-PM), proactive issue identification, failure analysis, and corrective actions.
• Identify, prioritize, and implement reliability, productivity, and Industry 4.0 initiatives that improve safety, quality, cost, and production performance.
• Partner with plant leadership, corporate functions, and cross-functional teams to align priorities, share best practices, manage risk, and deliver operational improvements.
• Build organizational capability by developing talent, fostering collaboration, leading through influence, and strengthening succession planning and team engagement.

What you will bring: 

• Experience in operations, engineering, reliability, continuous improvement, project management, or related business functions.
• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, Electrical, Electronics, Electromechanical, Automation Engineering, or a related technical field preferred.
• Experience in Corn Wet Milling or similar continuous manufacturing environments is preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to lead data-driven improvement initiatives using statistical analysis, process optimization, and performance metrics to improve reliability and operational results.
• Strong analytical, project management, and stakeholder management skills, with a proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and drive sustainable business improvements.

Who you are: 

• Proven change agent with a track record of driving organizational improvement and building commitment for new ways of working through data-driven decision-making.
• Strong project management, communication, presentation, and coaching skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
• Self-motivated leader with high integrity, sound judgment, and the ability to align teams around business objectives and deliver results.
• Skilled at fostering collaboration, trust, and account