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Director of Technical Operations (Maintenance)— Confidential Search

TalentGate is partnering with a growing food packaging and manufacturing business to recruit a Director of Technical Operations. This is a newly created, high-impact leadership role for a hands-on, execution-oriented technical leader who can build and lead the company’s maintenance, reliability, and equipment-performance capability across a multi-site operation.

The business is scaling rapidly, investing in automation, expanding customer capability, and professionalizing its operating model. As growth, complexity, and equipment intensity have increased, the company now requires a dedicated technical operations leader focused every day on uptime, line performance, equipment reliability, maintenance systems, technician leadership, and technical execution.

This is not a desk-based maintenance role and not an engineering-design position. The successful candidate will be highly visible on the floor, credible with technicians, practical in approach, and capable of creating the right level of structure without slowing down a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment.

The Opportunity

The Director of Technical Operations will lead maintenance, reliability, and equipment-performance activities across a dynamic, changeover-intensive food packaging environment. The company operates with a mix of legacy equipment, newer automation, and expanding production capability. The right leader will help improve uptime, strengthen preventive maintenance, build technician capability, improve parts and vendor management, and support the successful ramp-up and sustained performance of semi-automated and fully automated production lines.

This role is both an operating necessity and a value-creation lever. The person who succeeds here will help the business reduce recurring downtime, improve technical responsiveness, strengthen maintenance discipline, and support a more scalable, automation-enabled operating model.

Key Responsibilities

The Director of Technical Operations will:

Lead all maintenance and reliability activities across a multi-campus operation, improving uptime, line readiness, technical responsiveness, and equipment performance.

Serve as the senior technical escalation point for equipment issues, breakdowns, startup challenges, chronic downtime, and complex troubleshooting events.

Build stronger structure around preventive maintenance, maintenance scheduling, issue tracking, parts control, and equipment-support processes.

Develop, lead, and strengthen the maintenance technician team, including deployment, coaching, accountability, capability building, and long-term bench development.

Partner closely with operations and production leadership to ensure technicians are aligned to line needs and recurring issues are surfaced and solved quickly.

Own parts strategy and ordering discipline, ensuring the right critical parts, vendor support, and technical resources are available to minimize downtime.

Support the successful ramp-up and ongoing operation of newly installed semi-automated and fully automated lines.

Operate effectively across multiple buildings and campuses, maintaining strong physical presence and flexibility based on operating priorities.

Bring practical maintenance-system rigor to the business without imposing overly rigid large-company processes that do not fit the environment.

Help the company continue its progression from a successful entrepreneurial operator into a more professionally managed, technically scalable platform.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a highly credible, hands-on technical leader who understands how to keep packaging and food-related operations running in a fast-moving, high-changeover environment.

This person should be comfortable getting onto the floor, diagnosing issues, coaching technicians, and showing the team how work should be done when needed. At the same time, the company does not need a pure wrench-turner with no systems orientation. The winning candidate will strike the right balance: organized enough to build better structure, disciplined enough to drive follow-through, and practical enough to remain deeply connected to the work.

Required Experience and Capabilities

Food manufacturing or food packaging experience

Experience in food packaging, food manufacturing, or a related food-oriented technical environment is required. Quality, sanitation, food-safety, and regulatory expectations are central to how equipment is maintained and operated.

Hands-on technical troubleshooting depth

Strong mechanical and technical problem-solving ability, with enough familiarity across electrical, pneumatic, automation, and line-function issues to lead troubleshooting and direct the team effectively.

Packaging and line-environment breadth

Experience across a variety of packaging or production-line environments is preferred over narrow specialization. The successful candidate should be comfortable learning unfamiliar equipment and quickly becoming effective in keeping it running.

High-changeover operating experience

Experience in environments where product changes, line changes, customer requirements, and production variability are normal. Candidates from highly static continuous-run environments may find this operating model less familiar.

Maintenance leadership

Proven ability to lead technicians, organize work, improve accountability, coach performance, and create greater structure while staying connected to the realities of the floor.

Maintenance systems orientation

Ability to bring appropriate rigor to PM scheduling, issue tracking, maintenance planning, and parts management without overengineering the system.

Multi-site flexibility

Comfort operating across multiple buildings or campuses, with the willingness to move between locations based on technical need and business priorities.

Technical talent development

Ability to help attract, retain, and build technical talent in a market where strong maintenance professionals are scarce and highly valued.

Attractive Additional Experience

Experience in contract packaging, co-pack operations, or other highly service-oriented manufacturing environments.

Experience in confectionery, snacks, packaged foods, or adjacent food categories.

Experience supporting semi-automated and fully automated line additions in a growth environment.

Experience in entrepreneurial, lower-middle-market, founder-built, or private-equity-backed businesses undergoing professionalization.

What Success Looks Like

In the first 6 months, this leader will establish credibility with technicians and operations leadership, assess the current state of maintenance execution, identify the most important gaps in systems and leadership attention, and create a practical roadmap for stabilizing and upgrading technical operations.

By the first 12 months, success will include stronger preventive-maintenance execution, better technician deployment and accountability, fewer recurring equipment issues, improved parts and vendor-management processes, and greater confidence from operations leadership in maintenance responsiveness and line support.

Over the longer term, this leader will help build a more mature and scalable technical-operations function that supports continued growth, greater automation, expanded customer capability, and a stronger technical bench.

Candidate Fit

This role is best suited for a leader who is:

Hands-on and floor-oriented

Technically credible

Highly organized but practical

Comfortable in fast-changing production environments

Strong with technicians and operators

Urgent, responsive, and execution-focused

Able to build systems without becoming bureaucratic

Energized by growth, complexity, and operational improvement

This is not the right fit for someone who wants to manage maintenance from behind a desk, relies entirely on reports, or prefers highly resourced large-company environments with rigid systems already in place.