Job Description

Job Description

Description/Job Summary:

The Plant Manager is responsible for providing strong leadership and clear operational direction for all manufacturing, quality and maintenance activities at the Athens Plant, in alignment with RWDC’s Living Values. This role ensures the safe, timely, and optimized production of PHA resin while fostering a positive, accountable, and performance driven culture.

The Plant Manager provides strategic, developmental, and tactical leadership across all plant operations, including production, maintenance, and quality. They are accountable for meeting or exceeding RWDC standards related to Safety, Quality, Productivity, Cost, Preventive Maintenance, and Housekeeping, and for ensuring these standards are consistently understood, implemented, and upheld by all team members.

Through effective leadership, continuous improvement, and cross functional collaboration, the Plant Manager drives operational excellence while supporting the growth, development, and engagement of the plant workforce.

Plant Manager Responsibilities:

• Champion a culture of safety, care, and accountability by ensuring full compliance with all safety, environmental, and regulatory requirements. Actively model and reinforce behaviors that protect people, strengthen retention, and foster a workplace where team members feel valued and empowered to do their best work.
• Enable operational excellence by ensuring production, quality, and delivery commitments are consistently met. Encourage innovation and continuous improvement to enhance efficiency, product quality, and customer reliability.
• Lead with purpose and transparency to build a results‑driven culture, establishing clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and engage teams in problem‑solving. Guide root cause and corrective action efforts for critical issues, ensuring solutions are completed, sustained, and drive measurable improvement.
• Steward plant financial performance by developing, managing, and continuously improving operating and capital budgets. Balance fiscal discipline with strategic investment to support long term competitiveness and operational excellence.
• Develop people and leaders at every level, ensuring ongoing training and coaching programs strengthen supervisory effectiveness and continuously elevate the skills, capabilities, and engagement of hourly production associates.
• Establish and improve standard work and reliable processes that reduce variation, control costs, and maximize quality. Provide oversight across production control, scheduling, maintenance planning and cost accounting to ensure integrated and disciplined plant operations.
• Facilitate thoughtful cross functional collaboration, guiding critical decisions that impact plant performance and ensuring alignment across departments in support of shared goals.
• Lead responsible capital management, optimizing inventory levels and exercising sound judgment in purchase requisition approvals to support operational efficiency and financial health.
• Communicate openly and consistently by preparing and reviewing reports on plant performance, maintenance effectiveness, and improvement initiatives, enabling informed decision making and shared accountability.

Minimum Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in business administration management, Biosciences, Agriculture or related technical discipline or 10 years progressive manufacturing leadership experience and five years prior plant or large/complex department management.

Successful candidates require:

• Must communicate with clarity and purpose, sharing information openly, listening actively and ensuring alignment around goals, priorities and expectations.
• Fosters collaboration and cross functional teamwork to solve problems, make decisions and improve performance.
• Empower and develop others, actively coach leaders and team members by providing clear expectations and enabling individuals to grow their skills, confidence and ownership of results.
• The preferred candidate will be a proven leader with the ability to demonstrate integrity, humility and respect in all interactions and modeling the behaviors expected across the organization.
• Strong statistical literacy and ability to manage and interpret large amounts of data.
• Demonstrated ability to organize multiple protocols/projects and complete on schedule without oversite.
• Able to analyze and resolve problems at both a strategic and functional level.

Work Authorization Requirement

This role involves access to sensitive systems, intellectual property, and strategic infrastructure, making long-term work authorization a critical requirement. As a growing company with operational limitations and a focus on protecting proprietary technologies and trade secrets, we are currently unable to sponsor employment visas for this position. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States both now and for the foreseeable future (including the next five years).

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