Hydraulic Workshop Technician

Strip, inspect, repair and rebuild hydraulic components on your own bench. Cylinders, pumps, motors, valves. You get the job, you find the fault, you fix it, you write up what you found.

Workshop role - you are not on the road.

Metropolitan Hydraulic Services keep industry moving by solving hydraulic problems properly. Mines, tunnels, ports, manufacturing. Workshops at Smithfield and Mudgee.

We diagnose before we replace. If a pump comes in and the fault has not been found, it does not go out - near enough is not good enough here, and nobody will ask you to sign off on something you are not happy with.

Small teams. In Sydney you would be one of a handful at Smithfield. You would know everyone by name in a fortnight, and your opinion on a job would be the one that counts.

• Strip, clean, measure and inspect components. Report what you found and what caused it.

• Rebuild and test cylinders, pumps, motors and valves to spec.

• Assembly and kit work for our mine contracts - build to a parts list, to a lead time.

• Keep your own job records accurate in AroFlo. Hours, parts, findings.

• Keep the count honest on the stock you use. If it comes off the shelf and it is not recorded, it costs us a delivery.

• Keep your bench and the workshop in a state you would be happy to walk a customer through.

• Work alongside the apprentice and trade assistant on your site - showing them, not supervising them.

 Some of it is repetitive. Kit and assembly work is a steady part of the week alongside the repair work, and it goes to a customer who measures whether we delivered on time.

On day one

• A completed mechanical trade - fitter and turner, mechanical fitter, diesel fitter, plant mechanic, boilermaker, heavy vehicle. Which trade matters less than that you finished one.

• The mechanical aptitude to work out why something failed, not just what failed.

• Comfortable measuring accurately and working to tolerance.

• Driver’s licence.

• Australian working rights. These roles are not sponsored.

Would help

• Hydraulics experience - cylinders, pumps, motors, valve blocks.

• Machining, honing or chrome work.

• Mining, heavy earthmoving or industrial maintenance background.

• Having used a job management system before.

We will teach you

• Hydraulics, properly and formally - see below.

• Our test procedures, our documentation, our customers’ equipment.

 If you have never touched a hydraulic cylinder but you are a strong tradesperson, apply. We would rather teach hydraulics to someone who can diagnose than teach diagnosis to someone who knows hydraulics.

$47 to $54 an hour, plus 12% superannuation. Where you land in that range depends on your trade, your experience and what you can already do on a bench. We will be specific about it at interview, not vague.

Full time, 40 hours a week, Monday to Friday. Covered by the Manufacturing and Associated Industries and Occupations Award 2020. Approved additional hours are paid on top.

MEM40119 Certificate IV in Engineering (Fluid Power) - fully funded, and your rate goes up when you finish it

This is the part worth reading twice. APT Training is part of our group - the registered training organisation that delivers fluid power qualifications. So this is not a training budget you have to argue for each year. It is a nationally recognised qualification, delivered in-house, paid for by us, with a pay increase attached to completing it.

There are not many hydraulic workshops in Australia that can put that in writing.

Where it goes from here

Two paths out of this seat, and both are real. Field Service Technician - out with customers, on site, diagnosing in the field. Or Workshop Lead Technician - running the bench, the workload and the standard. Both our current lead technicians came up this way.

Workshop tools and test equipment provided, along with uniforms and PPE.

We would rather you knew now than found out in month three.

• The teams are small. When someone is away, it is felt. You would need to be reliable in a way you might not have to be somewhere with forty fitters.

• We are mid-fix. New structure, new systems, a fair bit of it recent. Some things are still rough. You would be joining a business that is fixing itself rather than one that has finished.

• Some weeks are kit and assembly. It is not all interesting failure diagnosis. The contract work pays for the workshop and it has to go out on time.

• The paperwork matters here. Job records, findings, stock. If recording what you did feels like an imposition, this will grate.

Click Apply.

Tell us about one job you are proud of: what came in, what you found, what you did about it. That tells us more than a list of employers.