Senior Permit Office Technician, Riverside

Cory is one of the UK’s leading waste management and recycling companies.

Cory operates one of the largest energy from waste facilities in the United Kingdom, with a unique river-based infrastructure on the Thames for delivering waste.

Cory’s decarbonisation strategy is centred around creating a decarbonisation hub at its Riverside site which uses CCS to decarbonise waste from local communities and reuses the energy extracted from this waste to power heat networks and provide baseload electricity.

Riverside 2 will be operational later this year. It will be one of the largest and most efficient EfW facilities in the UK, processing 650,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste generating enough electricity to power 176,000 homes each year. Together, the two facilities will divert around 1.4 million tonnes of waste from landfill each year.

The Role

In this role, you’ll be a key technical authority within the Permit Office, ensuring that all work on the Belvedere EfW site is executed safely, compliantly, and in line with the facilities safe system of work. You’ll work closely with Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, and Outage teams to provide high‑quality technical oversight of isolations, equipment status, and permit documentation. This means applying a deep understanding of industrial plant systems — mechanical, HV/LV electrical, and process — to maintain robust control of work on a complex, continuously operating facility.

A core element of the role is the technical assurance you provide around the Permit to Work (PTW) system. You’ll be trained as one of the sites Senior Approved Persons authorised for validating isolation boundaries, verifying plant status, reviewing method statements and risk assessments, and ensuring that all control measures are technically sound. You’ll support plant outages, major maintenance activities alongside day-to-day permit requests. You will be working with the Permit office, operations, engineering and maintenance departments to plan isolations, coordinate multi‑discipline work fronts, and maintain safe system boundaries throughout complex interventions.

You will also be involved in the technical side of asset‑related data, including reviewing safety rule instructions, analysing, reporting and defecting plant equipment concerns, interrogating P&IDs and ELDs, and supporting the development of operational procedures and risk assessments. You’ll contribute to environmental compliance by understanding how different plant systems interact with the Environmental Permit and ensuring that operational activities align with these requirements.

You will be expected to provide cover for the Permit Office Coordinator in times of absence which includes the management of the permit office function and team alongside the ordering of site bulk consumables.

This is a role for someone who wants to be at the centre of a live industrial environment — supporting real‑time decision‑making, coordinating technical activities with multiple stakeholders, and ensuring that engineering and maintenance work is completed without compromising safety, availability, or regulatory standards. It requires a blend of operational discipline, technical rigour, and calm control in a high‑hazard, fast‑moving environment.

We’re looking for someone with significant technical experience in a Permit Office or plant operations environment, ideally within energy‑from‑waste, power generation, heavy process, utilities or industrial operations. You must be confident managing work on a high‑hazard, high‑availability plant, with a solid grasp of electrical, mechanical and process system interactions. A strong working knowledge of site safety rules, plant isolations, operational boundaries and engineering controls is essential — this is a position for someone already comfortable in a safety‑critical, systems‑led environment.

You’ll need technical competence to review and validate isolations, interrogate P&IDs and ELDs, and understand how planned work affects plant integrity and operational risk. Experience as an Authorised Person for mechanical and LV isolations is expected, and familiarity with HV switching, PTW systems and complex outage scheduling will be highly advantageous. You should be confident assessing RAMS documentation, ensuring engineering controls are accurate, and identifying where additional safeguards or clarifications are required.

Strong analytical and organisational skills are essential, as you’ll be responsible for maintaining accurate permit records, validating technical documentation, overseeing routine operational tasks, and ensuring that consumables and waste‑by‑products are managed without interrupting the plant’s operational envelope. You’ll also be expected to support audits, implement corrective actions, and contribute to continuous improvement activities linked to safety, availability and environmental performance.

You should be self‑motivated, highly disciplined, and able to operate with autonomy when required. This is a role for someone who can provide technical leadership within the Permit Office — someone who is not only comfortable enforcing site rules but is also able to challenge unsafe or unclear practices, mentor others, and uphold engineering and operational standards across the site. Prior experience of being a Senior Authorised Person (SAP) adhering to and applying site safety rules would be advantageous, and holding a technical qualification (ONC/HNC), IOSH Managing Safely, NEBOSH certification, confined space management and competence with MS Office and CMMS tools will support your success in this role.