Associate Director – Reliability

Eli Lilly and Company; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Lilly in Houston seeks an Associate Director – Reliability to lead the maintenance organization and ensure readiness for GMP operations at the new site. You will build the reliability programs, manage staffing and training, and drive improvements across equipment performance and maintenance strategy.

During startup (expected 2029–2030), leadership roles will be fluid and collaborative as the site scales to full GMP manufacturing operations and transitions to day-to-day maintenance effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Lead, supervise, and coach the maintenance organization, including staff and contract resources, ensuring staff are qualified and trained.
• Own reliability staffing, recruitment, planning, capability development, and succession planning for GMP operations.
• Develop and maintain reliability programs, including the reliability roadmap, asset qualification, and maintenance strategies.
• Analyze equipment performance, downtime, and failures to drive improvements using RCA, FMEA and RCM.

Job description

At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us. Lilly is currently constructing an advanced manufacturing facility for production of API molecules located in Houston, TX. This facility is intended to provide APIs for current and future products, including new modalities. This is a unique opportunity to be a part of the site technical team for the startup of a greenfield manufacturing site, and the successful candidate will help to build the organization, the facility and the culture to enable a successful startup into GMP manufacturing operations. The Associate Director – Reliability provides leadership and direction to the reliability organization supporting Houston API manufacturing, ensuring that reliability deliverables are sufficiently resourced and qualified to support Small Molecule and Oligonucleotide production goals and the site business agenda. The role holder is directly responsible for the reliability technical programs, for the maintenance strategy executed by the maintenance organization, and for the analysis of equipment performance that drives its improvement. During the project delivery and startup phase (expected 2029–2030), leadership roles will be fluid and dynamic, requiring significant collaboration and resilience as the site scales to full GMP manufacturing operations. Following startup, the role holder is responsible for the day-to-day effectiveness of maintenance support and for planning the function across a six to twelve month horizon.

Responsibilities

The role holder will be, at a minimum, responsible for the following: Lead, supervise, and coach the maintenance organization, including maintenance supervisors, planner/schedulers, craft staff, and contract resources, completing performance management and development planning and ensuring staff are qualified, trained, and authorized to perform their assigned work. Own reliability staffing, including recruitment, resource planning, capability development, and succession planning, and build the organization, systems, and business processes required to support GMP operations, leveraging existing Lilly knowledge and practices while incorporating external experience and lean principles, and support the project team as they deliver the facility to the site organization. Develop and maintain the reliability technical programs, including the reliability roadmap, equipment criticality ranking, asset qualification monitoring, and the preventive and predictive maintenance strategy executed by the maintenance organization, ensuring equipment and facilities are maintained in a compliant and qualified state across the equipment lifecycle. Analyze equipment performance, work order history, failure coding, and downtime data to identify chronic and high-impact failures, and apply structured methodologies including Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to eliminate