Operations and Maintenance Manager (O&M Manager)

As an Operations and Maintenance Manager, you're responsible for both running equipment and keeping it running. You oversee operations staff, maintenance crews, and the constant trade-offs between production uptime and maintenance downtime. Whether it's a power plant, manufacturing facility, or infrastructure asset, your job is maximizing asset performance.

Your day balances competing priorities. You might review overnight production data, then meet with maintenance on an upcoming outage, then troubleshoot an equipment issue that's affecting output, then review spare parts inventory, then work on the capital plan for equipment replacement. Every decision involves weighing short-term production against long-term reliability.

The hardest part is preventing maintenance from being perpetually deferred. There's always pressure to keep equipment running, but deferred maintenance leads to failures. You need to advocate effectively for maintenance while being pragmatic about operational needs. The people who thrive here understand both operations and maintenance deeply and can make credible trade-off decisions.