Refractory Specialist

Description: The Bake Furnace Refractory Specialist is responsible for the long-term integrity, reliability, and performance of the plant’s carbon bake furnace refractory systems. This role serves as the plant’s primary subject-matter expert for refractory systems, including flue wall health, repair planning, material selection, vendor evaluation, and refractory performance monitoring.

Qualifications:

•    Bachelor’s degree in one of the following fields preferred: Engineering, Materials Science, Industrial Technology, Mechanical or Manufacturing discipline. Equivalent experience in refractory systems may be considered.

•    The incumbent should have experience with industrial furnace systems or refractory materials, and maintenance planning, materials management, or industrial process systems. Experience supervising maintenance crews is preferred.

•    Required core competencies also include the following: Analytical Problem Solving, Field Observation and Diagnostics, Long-Term Planning and Forecasting, Technical Documentation, Vendor and Contractor Management, Safety Leadership, Data Analysis and Software Systems.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Serve as the plant’s technical authority for bake furnace refractory systems, ensuring long-term structural integrity, maintenance planning, and making decisions which support reliability and production capability.
• Conduct daily furnace inspections, diagnose refractory conditions, and track trends in system health, damage progression, repairs, and lifecycle.
• Manage and maintain the refractory tracking system, ensuring accurate data entry, validation of data against field observations, and continuous improvement of system functionality.
• Establish repair priorities, develop short- and long-term maintenance plans and targets, and guide furnace repair and rebuild planning based on data and field conditions.
• Forecast, procure, and manage refractory materials and inventory to support ongoing and planned maintenance activities.
• Evaluate suppliers and materials, collaborate with vendors on product testing, and provide feedback to improve refractory performance and reliability, while maintaining good working relationships with suppliers.
• Supervise and schedule the brick crew, coordinating maintenance activities and ensuring safe, high-quality work execution aligned with production needs.
• Promote and enforce safe work practices, conduct safety meetings, and support incident investigations and continuous safety improvement.
• Develop and deliver training programs, maintain compliance records for crew members, and write/update safe work procedures and technical documentation.
• Monitor repair quality, perform root cause analysis of failures, lead initiatives to improve refractory performance, analyze laboratory and material evaluations, and produce reports on refractory condition.
• Coordinate refractory work with production, maintenance, and contractors, including scheduling, logistics, execution, and waste removal. 
• Maintain detailed production and maintenance records, generate reports, and prepare documentation for audits, studies, and improvement initiatives.
• Track refractory spending, manage material budgets, and support cost control efforts in collaboration with purchasing and plant leadership.