About this opportunity
Are you an experienced technical leader with a passion for maintenance excellence, automation, and operational performance? We are looking for a
Head of Maintenance & Automation (Weesp & Olst)
to lead and shape the maintenance, reliability, and manufacturing automation strategy across two key manufacturing sites in the Netherlands.
In this strategic leadership role, you will be responsible for ensuring the safe, reliable, and compliant operation of manufacturing assets and automation systems within a highly regulated and complex production environment. You will lead multidisciplinary teams, foster a culture of continuous improvement, and drive initiatives that enhance asset reliability, maximize operational efficiency, and safeguard business continuity.
As a key member of the Site Leadership Team, you will play an active role in shaping the broader site strategy and contributing to overall business performance. This position offers significant visibility and exposure to senior leadership, along with strong career development opportunities towards site leadership, senior operations management, and divisional technical leadership roles, based on business needs and individual performance.
Responsibilities
Develop and execute the maintenance, reliability, and automation strategy across multiple manufacturing sites.
Lead the Maintenance and Manufacturing Automation organizations, building a high-performing and future-ready workforce.
Drive preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance excellence to improve equipment uptime and asset reliability.
Own the manufacturing asset lifecycle strategy, including asset renewal plans and long-term investment roadmaps.
Lead Manufacturing Automation and Operational Technology (OT) initiatives, ensuring systems remain reliable, compliant, secure, and aligned with business needs.
Define and govern automation standards, cybersecurity strategies, and automation architecture frameworks.
Partner with Engineering and Operations on capital projects, ensuring maintenance, reliability, and automation requirements are embedded from design through commissioning.
Establish KPI frameworks and leverage data-driven insights to continuously improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Foster a culture of safety, accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement throughout the organization.
Qualifications
Master's degree in Engineering, Technology, Operations Management, or a related discipline.
Minimum 10 years of leadership experience within Maintenance, Reliability, Manufacturing Automation, or Technical Operations.
Proven success leading large technical organizations across multiple manufacturing sites.
Strong expertise in reliability engineering and preventive and predictive maintenance methodologies.
Experience working within a regulated manufacturing environment, preferably GMP regulated.
Strong understanding of manufacturing automation systems, Operational Technology (OT), and computerized systems.
Demonstrated success in improving equipment reliability, uptime, and operational performance.
Experience supporting capital projects, asset lifecycle management, and operational readiness initiatives.
Why Join Us?
This is a unique opportunity to lead a critical function within a highly automated manufacturing environment. You'll have the chance to influence long-term site strategy, drive digital transformation, strengthen manufacturing reliability, and develop talented technical teams while making a direct impact on operational excellence and business performance.
If you're ready to lead the future of maintenance and automation through innovation, reliability, and people development, we'd love to hear from you.
Apply today and help build the next generation of manufacturing excellence.
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Manufacturing & CMC role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 2648 comparable Manufacturing & CMC roles across 168 biopharma companies.
Salary context
688 of 2648 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function. This posting doesn't list a seniority level, so peers aren't narrowed by seniority either -- the range below may span more levels than usual.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 2648 comparable roles
+ 55 more countries
Seniority mix
1242 of 2648 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
19 of 2648 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
Notify me about similar jobs
Get an email when we spot other openings like this one – same job function, comparable seniority, roles you'd actually want to see.
How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.