Description The Maintenance Planner owns work order planning and scheduling for Fervo's fleet of geothermal generating facilities. This position reports to the Director, Maintenance & Reliability, and is the single point of ownership for turning an identified maintenance need into a fully planned, resourced, and scheduled work order. That need can originate as PM or CbM work generated by the maintenance strategy, or as a Work Request raised by Operations, Maintenance, Commissioning, or Reliability Technicians in the field.
At Fervo, we follow the Palmer methodology for Maintenance Planning and Scheduling; with clear distinctions between the Planning function and the Maintenance Execution function. Therefore, this role will not be involved in hands on maintenance work, but is expected to spend meaningful time in the field with Operations and Maintenance teams . This field time allows the Planner to understand the facilities, identify opportunities, and use that field experience to create and improve maintenance plans.
This position is responsible for both Planning and Scheduling. Planning determines what a job requires: parts, labor hours, discipline, procedure, permits, and outage or access windows, before it is scheduled. Scheduling determines when the job runs and which crew executes it, sequenced against competing priorities across every active site. The expected time allocations for these functions is approximately 80/20, planning to scheduling.
Requirements
Responsibilities
Work Order Planning
- Convert preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance Work Requests into fully planned work orders in the CMMS system. Each plan includes scope of work, procedure reference, required parts, estimated labor hours, and discipline requirements.
- Process Work Requests from the fleet: PM/CbM work generated by the maintenance strategy, and Work Requests raised by Operations, Maintenance, Commissioning, Engineering, and Reliability. Work procedures will be built according to priority, asset criticality, and repeatability of the activity.
- Work procedures shall be built by equipment type, not by site, so job plans are reusable between power generating facilities on similar equipment.
- Provide labor and time estimates on every plan, even when imperfect. Iterate upon each plan through feedback received from the technicians to improve plans over time.
- Verify job plans before release: parts on hand or on order, permits identified, and any outage or equipment-access window confirmed with Operations.
- Maintain a 4 to 6 week rolling backlog of planned, ready-to-schedule work across all sites, sorted by priority and readiness. A plan is not complete until it is schedulable without further work by planning.
- Serve as the fleet's plant historian: maintain the searchable record of work performed, parts consumed, and findings identified on each asset, so future job plans are built from actual maintenance history rather than reconstructed from memory.
Scheduling
- Build and maintain the weekly maintenance schedule for the fleet: a prioritized list of work derived from the Ready Backlog (Planning) broken down by labor types, and covering 100% of available work hours.
- Coordinate week ahead crew hours and schedule commitments directly with site maintenance supervisors; the supervisor owns execution and day-of crew direction, the Planner creates the list of work derived from the craft availability and the contents of the ready backlog.
- Bundle jobs on common equipment or in the same area/facility when scheduling, to reduce mobilization and production overhead rather than dispatching a crew separately for each work order.
- Support Maintenance when unplanned/unscheduled opportunities arise to execute work from the Planned backlog. These tasks will break the current schedule but may alsi provide operational or maintenance opportunities that make them more worthwhile.
- Recognize that Site Execution has final authority to break the published schedule for any reason deemed necessary. When that happens, rework the affected plan and future schedule rather than treating the break as a compliance failure.
CMMS Ownership
- Own the CMMS as the system of record for planning and scheduling data across the fleet including work order quality, backlog accuracy, and schedule compliance reporting.
- Track and report the fleet's critical M&R KPIs as derived from The CMMS: schedule compliance, PM compliance, backlog size in weeks, and the ratio of planned to reactive to emergency work. These are the numbers the Director, Maintenance & Reliability uses to judge whether the M&R program is actually working.
- Maintain the asset hierarchy, PM templates, and job plan library in The CMMS so that recurring work does not need to be re-planned from scratch at each site.
- Help develop training plans for new employees on appropriate work streams and the use of The CMMS.
Parts and Materials Coordination
- Identify and reserve parts and materials required for planned work, coordinating with Supply Chain on lead times for anything not on hand.
- Flag parts availability as a schedule risk before a job is committed to the schedule, not after a crew is already mobilized.
- Update recurring work procedures with learnings from past work, including specific tools, consumables, and parts required to execute work tasks more effectively.
Coordination and Escalation
- Coordinate with engineering, maintenance and operations on newly generated PM/CbM work and on feedback from completed jobs that should inform future job plans.
- Coordinate with Engineering, Operations, Maintenance, Commissioning, and Reliability Technicians as the standing notification sources feeding the planning backlog, and with Operations specifically on equipment access, outage windows, and any schedule changes that affect plant availability.
- Escalate to the Director, Maintenance & Reliability any resource conflict, parts shortfall, or schedule risk that cannot be resolved at the Planner level.
Requirements
Required
- 5 or more years of maintenance planning and scheduling experience in an industrial, power generation, or process plant environment, directly supporting a work force of between 10 and 20 technicians.
- Direct working experience with a CMMS (MaintainX, Maximo, SAP, or comparable) for work order planning, PM template management, backlog reporting and KPI management.
- Strong knowledge of the preventive and predictive maintenance concepts required to plan work generated by a reliability program.
- Experience scheduling multi-discipline maintenance work across more than one site or unit concurrently.
- Experience coordinating parts and materials lead times with a supply chain or procurement function.
- Strong written communication; job plans, schedules, and backlog reporting must be usable by people who were not in the room when the plan was made.
Preferred
- Experience in geothermal or other utility-scale power generation maintenance.
- Professional background as a plant maintenance technician, engineer, or operator, with the relevant experience necessary to estimate labor hours for a variety of work tasks with reasonable accuracy.
- Familiarity with RCM or FMEA-based maintenance strategy development, even if not the role setting that strategy.
- Professional credentials such as CMRP, CMRT, or similar certifications.
Location
Fervo Energy is headquartered in Houston, TX with growing offices in Oakland, CA, Golden, CO, Salt Lake City, UT, and Reno, NV. This position supports the fleet from launch, with travel to active sites, currently Cape Station in Milford, UT, as Planning and Scheduling needs require. Travel required is dependent upon relevant experience and will settle at ~15-20%.