REACTIVE MAINTENANCE LEAD - Permanent - Reading (2 days/week in office)
Snapshot: To manage and control low-priority unplanned maintenance activity (primarily P5 tickets) relating to passive infrastructure, ensuring work is triaged correctly, delivered by the right party, at the right time, and in line with business risk appetite and budget constraints.
This role sits right at the centre of reactive maintenance — where judgement, insight, and smart systems design combine to protect service levels while driving long-term efficiency. As Reactive Maintenance Lead, you’ll own how reactive tickets are assessed, prioritised, allocated, and increasingly automated.
You won’t just keep the system moving—you’ll make it better every day. By applying risk-based decision making, enforcing accountability on warranties and defects, and designing smarter workflows, you’ll help shift work from reactive to planned and reduce unnecessary spend.
Why this role matters
Reactive maintenance is where cost, customer impact, and operational risk collide. This role ensures the right work goes to the right place, at the right time—for the right reason. Your decisions will protect service today, while your insights will help shape a more resilient, efficient future.
What you’ll do:
You’ll blend operational leadership with process and automation thinking, acting as the gatekeeper and optimiser of reactive demand. You’ll:
Triage, Prioritisation & Allocation
- Triage all incoming reactive maintenance tickets, validating prioritisation based on risk, severity, and customer or service impact. Blockers
- Control release of low-priority work—using risk judgement, resource availability, and financial limits to protect SLAs and operational capacity.
- Allocate work to the right resolving agent— our supplier, remediation teams, managed service providers, specialists, or third parties — based on our obligations and issue type.
- Work with the Inspection & Maintenance supplier to define attributes that enable smarter bundling by geography and skill, reducing repeat visits and wasted effort.
Warranty, Quality & Programme Defect Control
- Review historic maintenance and capital works to identify applicable warranties, guarantees, and quality defects.
- Prevent avoidable reactive spend by routing work back to suppliers under defect liability.
- Track recurring defects and escalate to commercial, programme, or shareholder teams to drive accountability and resolution.
- Persistently manage suppliers to closure—taking ownership until the right outcome is achieved.
Insight, Trends & Continuous Improvement
- Analyse failure trends and recurring issues, feeding insight into Infrastructure Management to influence planned maintenance strategies.
- Help shift demand from reactive to planned, improving long-term asset reliability.
- Provide trusted operational intelligence that supports smarter decisions across internal teams and third-party suppliers.
Workflow Optimisation & Automation
- Design and refine rules-based logic for automated triage, warranty detection, allocation, and job bundling.
- Collaborate with digital teams to implement low-code/no-code workflows.
- Test, measure, and iterate—reducing manual handling, error rates, and rework while building trust in automation.
Reporting & Performance
- Monitor and report on KPIs including triage accuracy, rework rates, defect recoveries, automation success, and resolution performance by supplier.
- Report the balance of allocated vs. Unallocated work to support understanding of asset risk exposure.
- Challenge the status quo—bringing external market insight and a “better every day” mindset to drive change.
Who we’re looking for:
You’re someone who thrives where operations, data, and judgement intersect. You’ll have:
- Strong experience in reactive maintenance, service operations, or workflow control within utilities, transport, infrastructure, or similarly complex environments.
- Confidence applying risk-based decision making in fast-moving, ambiguous situations.
- A solid understanding of contracts, warranties, defect liability, and supplier obligations—and the persistence to enforce them.
- Analytical capability—you’re comfortable working with data, trends, and rules logic to inform decisions.
- A collaborative, trust-building style, paired with the courage to take ownership and drive change.
If you also have the following, we’re especially interested in talking to you:
- Experience with BMC Remedy, Site Tracker, or similar tools.
- IAM awareness
- Experience in a joint venture environment.
- ITIL awareness