Facilities & Maintenance Technician
Website Future Fields
Manufacturing recombinant proteins with whole fruit flies
About the role
This is a broad, important job, and it is hands-on from day one. You’ll be receiving liquid nitrogen, changing filters, running the preventive maintenance schedule, keeping consumables stocked, chasing the contractor who said it will be done by Tuesday, and writing down what you did so the next person doesn’t have to work it out from scratch. Some of it is skilled. Some of it is a wrench and a Thursday afternoon. We need someone who is good at both and above neither.
Our operations span two adjacent downtown Edmonton properties on a single lot: a 1950s brick warehouse housing our offices and upper-floor lab, and Instar, a repurposed 1980s facility transformed via a $3M buildout into an insect-rearing space and cleanroom. Together, these buildings feature complex infrastructure, including cleanroom-dedicated HVAC, an RO water purification setup, humidification systems, compressed air lines, -80°C cold storage, a basement currently in development, and an expanding suite of industrial equipment. With daily demands across these systems currently addressed on an ad hoc basis by whoever is available, dedicated oversight is required to keep everything running smoothly.
You’ll report to Abbas, our Lab Operations Lead, and escalate technical problems to Brian, our Senior Engineer. You won’t have direct reports, but you will direct contractors and service vendors, and within a year you should be the person the whole company goes to when something in the building isn’t right.
You don’t need a ticket, a diploma, or any biotech experience to do this job well. We’ll go into that below, because we mean it.
This role will own
Receiving and materials handling
* Own receiving end-to-end across both buildings: inspect what arrives, check it against the packing slip and paperwork, and flag damage or discrepancies before anything moves.
* Log every incoming lot in Benchling—lot number, expiry, certificate of analysis—so what’s on the shelf and what’s in the system agree.
* Hold material until it’s been checked against its specification and released, then get it into the right storage: ambient, cold, flammables, acids. Keep expired stock out of circulation before someone reaches for it.
* Catch temperature-sensitive shipments before they sit. Know whether a box belongs in the fridge or the -20°C freezer and get it there immediately.
* Be the person on site for deliveries that don’t book a time: liquid nitrogen, gas cylinders, equipment.
Equipment maintenance and upkeep
* Routine maintenance on lab and production equipment: filter changes, cleaning, consumable swaps, the small recurring work that keeps instruments alive.
* Build and run a documented preventive maintenance schedule across equipment and building systems—and execute it rather than aspire to it.
* Schedule contractor and vendor service, be present for it, and record what was actually done before you sign.
* Be the first look when something stops working. Check the obvious things yourself, know when it’s past you, and get the right person in.
Building systems and general upkeep
* Help keep both buildings running: HVAC, RO and process water, compressed air, humidification, cold storage, electrical, plumbing, drainage, lifts. The routine and preventive side is yours; the engineering problems are Brian’s, and you’ll learn a great deal working alongside him on them.
* Small repairs are yours. Leaks, blocked drains, a door that won’t latch, a failed sensor, the daily unglamorous list.
* Own the spaces nobody owns—basement, storage areas, loading dock, front room—on a schedule, not when it becomes a flood.
* Own the facilities request queue, so facilities questions stop landing on our engineering team.
Inventory and consumables
* Support consumables inventory across both buildings: what we have, what’s running out, and what hasn’t moved in a year.
* Order against real usage. A stockout should be something you prevented, not something you reported.
* Own utility accounts, waste pickup, and gas and consumables ordering.
Documentation
* Write the one-pagers that don’t exist yet—what to do when the freezer beeps, how to refill the liquid nitrogen, where the filters are and how to change them. Not audited SOPs. The practical version, for the Friday evening when the people who know are gone.
* Keep them where people will actually find them: attached to the equipment record in our Lab Information Management System (Benchling) and our Quality Management System (Qualio).
* Build and maintain a register of our equipment and utilities across both buildings—what we have, where it is, what it’s connected to, and what it draws. Nobody has ever written this down in one place, and we need it.
* Maintain one live contact register—suppliers, sales reps, service techs—mapped to the equipment each of them covers. Today that information is split across three systems and nobody checks any of them.
* Keep equipment records current: service reports, repairs, dates, costs.
* Document every repair. If it happened and it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen.
What you’ll grow into
* Supporting qualification of our facilities and utilities—cleanroom pressure differentials, HEPA certification, water system sampling, HVAC performance. A contractor authors the protocols; you’ll execute them on the live systems and own the monitoring programs afterwards. We will teach you IQ/OQ of instruments.
* Mapping facility and utility capacity against our manufacturing roadmap, so our next physical constraint is a decision rather than an emergency.
* More of the building, as fast as you can take it on.
About you
You are practical, and you finish things. You’d rather fix it than file a ticket about it, and you write down what you did because you’ve been the person who had to guess what someone else did.
What we need you to have done before
* Hands-on maintenance or facilities work—a plant, a lab, a shop, a farm, a processing facility. Not office facilities. Somewhere things break and you were the one who dealt with it.
* Fixed the small things yourself rather than dispatching them. You own tools, and you know what you can and can’t safely take apart.
* Dealt with contractors or vendors, at least at the level of booking the work, being there for it, and checking what was actually done.
* Written things down—records, logs, procedures, checklists—somewhere that someone else relied on.
* Worked without much day-to-day direction. You’ll have a manager and you’ll have support, but most days nobody is standing over you deciding what’s next.
* Comfortable with the physical parts of the job: lifting, ladders, cylinders, cold rooms, an early start when a delivery needs one.
What matters more than the resume
* Resourcefulness. You can improvise a working fix out of what’s on hand while the proper part is three weeks away—and you know the difference between a good fix and a bad one.
* A real work ethic. You know what a day’s work is, and no task here is beneath you.
* Independent thought. We’re small enough that “acceptable” doesn’t work. We’d rather you ask an obvious question than quietly do the wrong thing, and we’d rather you tell us the plan is wrong than execute it neatly.
* You want to learn this properly. The building is getting more complicated—cleanrooms, qualification, a formal quality system. We’d like you to grow into that with us.
Where you might be coming from
Contract or analytical labs, food and beverage processing, brewing, agriculture, building or equipment maintenance, a service or field-tech role, the trades, or the military. An apprenticeship, a journeyman ticket, a technologist diploma, or none of the above—we care about what you’ve kept running, not which of those it was. Roughly 2–3 years of hands-on work of some kind, and we’re more interested in the shape of it than the length.
To apply for this job please visit futurefields.applytojobs.ca.