Reliability Engineer

Speno Rail Maintenance Australia delivers specialist rail grinding and maintenance services across some of the country's most demanding heavy haul and metropolitan networks. Our machines are among the most technically sophisticated assets operating on the Australian rail network — purpose-built, heavily instrumented, and worked hard in remote environments.

About the Role

We are creating a Reliability Engineer position to drive the reliability, efficiency and maintenance performance of our machine fleet.

You will work through a staged programme of asset-focused projects, taking one machine at a time and building a complete engineering picture of how it performs in the field — where availability is lost, where maintenance effort is being spent, where failures repeat, and where productivity can be won back. From there you will lead the interventions, redesign the maintenance strategy, and embed the improvements so they hold.

This is a hands-on role with real technical authority. You will be embedded with the crews who operate and maintain our machines, rostered alongside them including night shift, because the only way to understand equipment of this complexity is to see it working.

Key Accountabilities

• Lead the reliability and efficiency improvement programme across the machine fleet, working through a staged sequence of asset-focused projects

• Work rostered shifts with operating and maintenance crews to understand equipment performance firsthand

• Establish and own the fleet's technical event and defect register, ensuring data is captured, categorised, trended and closed out to a consistent standard

• Lead formal root cause investigations (ICAM / 5-Why / fault tree analysis) and drive corrective actions through to completion

• Apply reliability engineering methodology — FMEA, criticality assessment and defect elimination — to remove repeat failure modes rather than manage them

• Review and redesign maintenance strategies: task scope, intervals, resourcing and critical spares holdings

• Manage the technical relationship with OEMs and specialist suppliers across control systems, hydraulics and measurement systems, holding them to substantive engineering outcomes

• Build the commercial case for improvement opportunities, quantifying the operational and financial value of each intervention

• Report on fleet reliability performance to the leadership group and shape the forward asset strategy

About You

• Degree qualified in Mechatronics, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering, with a minimum of 5 years' experience on complex mobile plant in rail, mining or heavy manufacturing

• Genuinely multi-disciplinary, spanning hydraulics, PLC and control systems, and measurement systems

• Formally trained in RCA/FMEA methodology, with a track record of leading investigations to a definitive, evidence-based conclusion

• Comfortable moving between the data and the machine — equally at ease analysing performance trends and standing on the deck at 2am

• Strong interpersonal judgement — able to build credibility quickly with experienced crews and lead with authority while remaining genuinely open to their operational insight

• Committed to working the roster, residential or FIFO

Why This Role

This is a newly created position, which means you will shape it. You will own the reliability function end to end — the data, the analysis, the interventions and the strategy — with direct access to leadership and the mandate to change how our machines are maintained. The project-based structure means genuine variety: each machine brings a different technical challenge across mechanical, hydraulic, electrical and control systems.

Success is measured in real engineering outcomes: improved availability and mean time between failures, reduced maintenance cost per production hour, a closing defect backlog, and maintenance strategies that endure long after each project is finished.

If you want ownership of an outcome rather than a seat in a technical services team, we would like to hear from you.