Mechanical Defect Elimination Engineer

Date: 13 Nov 2025

Job Posting End Date:

Job Country:Australia

Job State/Province: South Australia

Job Location/Region: Roxby Downs

About BHP

At BHP we support our people to grow, learn, develop their skills and reach their potential. With a global portfolio of operations, we offer a diverse and inclusive environment with extraordinary career opportunities. Our strategy is to focus on creating a safe work environment where our employees feel strongly connected to our values and objectives, and where the capability of our people is key to our success.

Come and be a part of this success.

About the Role

We are currently looking for a defect elimination engineer/specialist to join our Fixed Plant Reliability team. This role provides technical support, advice, and the formulation of solutions to Fixed Plant maintenance to enhance safety, reliability, availability, efficiency of maintenance strategies, and cost control. The role is biased towards developing and implementing execution-based technical solutions and driving the right defect elimination culture for improving equipment performance and reliability. The role will also support the identification of constraints within the ore processing plant, identification of improvement opportunities and maintaining cadence on the delivery of debottlenecking execution activities.

This role will be based in Olympic Dam on a 7/7 Roster. You can elect to FIFO ex-Adelaide, DIDO or reside residentially.

In this role you will:

• Ensuring an overriding commitment to health, safety, and sustainable development.
• Build strong working relationships with key stakeholders across the business
• Positively shape culture in alignment with the BHP Charter Values.
• Building, refining, and sustaining Defect Elimination routines and processes aligned to our key value drivers, applied throughout all levels of Fixed Plant Maintenance.
• Applying proven reliability strategies to eliminate defects as identified through our Defect Elimination process.
• Monitoring and scrutiny of equipment defects and failures that cause disruption to plant and equipment.
• Embedding and sustaining quality control programs to improve quality of root cause analysis.
• Overseeing the day-to-day defect elimination triggers and lead investigations for Processing Fixed Plant team.
• Providing leadership to Surface Reliability and Execution team and empowering them to support performance of the entire bore field and desalination plant and improving the defect elimination culture within the teams.
• Lead process improvement initiatives to support customer group by leveraging BOS practices.
• Taking responsibility for identifying and resolving systemic issues, and for assessing the potential impact on production, plant, and equipment.
• Execute high value Field Leadership observations.

About You

• Safety minded, with proven ability to demonstrate HSEC behaviours
• You will have a proven commitment to look after your own wellbeing and the confidence to speak up when others put themselves in harm's way.
• You hold an Engineering degree and/or have the demonstrated relevant experience in mining/manufacturing or processing plants. Additionally, proven experience in leadership, reliability engineering, technical support, troubleshooting, and solution generation is desirable.
• Experience in water treatment and/or desalination plant is highly desirable
• Experience in use of lean-manufacturing / six-sigma technical problem-solving methodologies.
• Ability to engage with others and to use multiple data points to take a planned and structured approach to solving problems.
• Sound experience in the identification of failure modes and equipment criticality.
• Experience in maintenance strategy improvement and optimisation.
• Familiarity with Citect SCADA, PI Vision, Ampla, GE APM, and CMMS systems (e.g. 1SAP) is highly desirable.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills; ability to present and discuss technical information in a way that establishes rapport, persuades others, and gains understanding.
• Be a team player, but also be able to work effectively unsupervised and be highly self-motivated.

About Our Process

At BHP, we are committed to employing individuals who align with the BHP Charter Values and meet the requirements of the role. As part of the recruitment process, there are a number of checks which may be conducted to demonstrate applicants suitability for a role including police / criminal background checks, medical, drug and alcohol testing, due diligence checks, right to work checks, and/or reference checks.

If you are already employed directly by BHP, please log in using your BHP email address or apply via our internal jobs portal.

Supporting a Diverse Workforce

The size, stability and magnitude of our business not only provides significant opportunity for professional development, but also attractive salary packages with performance-based bonuses and a best-in-class employee share program. We know there are many aspects of our employees' lives that are important, and work is only one of these, so we offer benefits to enable your work to fit with your life. These benefits include flexible working options, a generous paid parental leave policy, other extended leave entitlements and parent rooms.

At BHP, we know that we are strengthened by diversity. We are an Equal Opportunity employer that is committed to making BHP a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and be at their best every day. We are focused on creating a workforce that's more diverse and represents the communities where we work and live. providing a work environment in which everyone is included, treated fairly and with respect. We are an Equal Opportunity employer and recognise that true diversity includes gender, age, race, disability status, sexual orientation, religion, neurodiversity, education levels, and many more aspects of your identity.

BHP is committed to providing a recruitment process that is fair, equitable and accessible for all. If you have a disability, we know that it may be helpful for us to adjust our process to make it equitable for your individual situation. If you would like to reach out to someone about your situation and our recruitment process, please email us at .