Job Description:

Night Shift Engineering & Maintenance Manager

Location: Manchester
Salary: £55,000–£65,000 per annum
Shift: Permanent Nights – 6:00pm–6:00am, 4 shifts out of every 7, including weekends

Benefits: NEST pension, 22.5 days' annual leave, free onsite parking and overtime opportunities

The Opportunity

My client is a long-established, independent family bakery with generations of baking heritage and a strong reputation within the industry.

We are looking for an experienced engineering leader to take responsibility for the maintenance function across the permanent night shift.

Importantly, this is not a desk-based management role. You will remain hands-on, supporting engineers with breakdowns, fault finding and maintenance activity, while also taking responsibility for developing the team, improving engineering standards and strengthening the site's Planned Preventative Maintenance programme.

A key part of the role will be helping develop the maintenance strategy and PPM processes for a new, highly automated, state-of-the-art bakery currently being built. This facility will operate differently to the existing sites and will require a new, structured approach to planned maintenance and reliability.

The role could suit an existing Engineering Shift Manager or Maintenance Manager, but we would also consider a strong Engineering Team Leader, Lead Engineer or Senior Maintenance Engineer ready to step up.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and support the night-shift Maintenance Engineers, prioritising workloads and setting strong engineering standards.
• Remain actively involved in mechanical and electrical fault finding, breakdowns and repairs across production equipment.
• Take the lead during major breakdowns, coordinating resources to minimise production downtime.
• Identify recurring faults and work with the team to address root causes rather than relying on repeated reactive repairs.
• Review, improve and develop PPM schedules across existing equipment and the new bakery facility.
• Ensure planned maintenance is properly scheduled, completed, recorded and followed through.
• Help move the engineering function towards a more proactive, preventative and reliability-focused approach.
• Coach and develop engineers, identifying skills gaps and helping improve both mechanical and electrical capability across the team.
• Encourage knowledge sharing and cross-training so the team becomes increasingly self-sufficient.
• Work closely with Production, Hygiene, Technical and wider site management to support operational priorities.
• Provide clear shift handovers and ensure outstanding faults and maintenance actions are properly communicated.
• Support machinery installations, upgrades, engineering projects and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Ensure all maintenance activity meets site health, safety, food safety and hygiene standards.

Equipment

The engineering team supports a broad range of bakery and production equipment, including industrial ovens, boilers, sieves, dough forming and shaping machinery, motors, gearboxes, conveyors, sensors, electrical controls and automated production equipment.

Bakery experience would be advantageous, although candidates from food, beverage, pharmaceutical, packaging or other fast-paced FMCG manufacturing environments would also be relevant.

About You

You will need strong hands-on industrial maintenance experience, with excellent mechanical fault-finding skills and practical electrical knowledge.

You should also be able to demonstrate:

• Experience leading, supervising or developing Maintenance Engineers.
• Strong reactive and planned maintenance experience.
• The ability to develop and improve PPM systems rather than simply follow existing schedules.
• Good problem-solving and root cause analysis skills.
• The confidence to make decisions independently during a busy night shift.
• A collaborative, team-first approach and the ability to coach and develop others.

Why Join?

This business offers something different to a large corporate manufacturing environment. It is a genuine family-run business where people are valued, hard work is recognised and new employees are made to feel welcome and supported.

There is already an experienced night engineering team in place, giving the successful manager a strong platform to build from.

This is an opportunity to remain close to the practical side of engineering while having real influence over team development, PPM, reliability and the engineering strategy for an exciting new bakery facility.

If you have any questions please let me know, please apply now!