Engineering - Maintenance Manager (Reliability Manager) in Whitefield

Engineering – Maintenance Manager (Reliability Manager)

We have an exciting opportunity for a Maintenance (Reliability) Manager to join our Engineering team at our Kara site as part of Finsbury Food Group. Established in 1985, Kara offers a wide range of quality sweet and savoury bakery products, including both gourmet butter and vegan brioche buns, doughballs and teacakes. The Kara Bakery can bake over 1 million baps and burger buns every day.

Location: Kara Foodservice, Manchester

Shift: Monday to Friday

Salary: Competitive

In this role, you will take ownership of driving asset reliability through planned engineering strategies, preventative maintenance, and structured problem-solving. Reporting to Engineering Manager, you will lead the development and delivery of asset care plans that reduce downtime, improve OEE, maximise asset availability, and optimise lifecycle cost.

Responsibilities

As a Reliability Manager, you will champion a proactive reliability culture—focused on zero harm, zero breakdowns, and continuous improvement—while motivating, coaching, and developing high‑performing engineering teams and contractors. You will promote strong Safety, Quality, Environmental, and Food Safety standards across all engineering activities and act as the subject matter expert for Maintenance and Reliability practices.

Day to day, you will guide teams through RCA, OEE analysis, and FMEAs; develop and implement preventative, predictive, and condition‑based maintenance strategies; and work closely with planning teams to align maintenance activities with production needs. You will prioritise and approve critical work, maintain accurate asset data in the CMMS, and lead structured problem‑solving to eliminate recurring failures.

You will also drive improvement initiatives to reduce breakdowns and costs while increasing performance, ensuring lessons learned are captured and embedded into best practice. In addition, you will coach and mentor engineers, manage skill development and succession planning, and support training in maintenance systems, continuous improvement tools, and engineering safety standards.

Qualifications

• Experience leading Maintenance/Reliability within a fast‑paced manufacturing environment.
• Strong knowledge of asset reliability principles, including TPM, RCM, RCA, OEE, and predictive maintenance.
• Skilled in using CMMS, maintenance scheduling tools and reliability analytics.
• Proven ability to lead engineering teams, contractors, and drive cross‑functional collaboration.
• Strong understanding of asset lifecycle management, budget control and CapEx planning.
• Excellent communication, analytical and organisational skills.
• Strong analytical skills to interpret downtime data, maintenance trends and root cause analysis.
• Experience using KPIs to measure maintenance performance and implement improvements.
• Strong knowledge of Health & Safety, permit‑to‑work, Food Safety and regulatory requirements.
• Competent in Microsoft Office and maintenance systems.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to influence, challenge and drive best practice among engineering teams.

Benefits

• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Leave to allow quality time with your new arrival!
• Enhanced Pension Scheme for our employees
• Death in Service Benefit
• Free Employee Assistance Programme (open to colleagues and their families)
• Retail discounts accessible via our Benefits Hub platform!
• Refer a Friend Scheme (up to £300 per referral – T&C’s dependent)
• Employee Recognition Awards· Extensive Learning & Development opportunities (including opportunities for sponsored professional memberships and our own in‑house development course!)
• An opportunity to be part of a fantastic, growing organisation. Head over to our LinkedIn page to find out more!

Our vision is to be the leading specialty bakery group in the UK, and we want the best people in place to achieve this. Our continued success is built entirely on the talented people who work here, so employee development is important to us because everyone is a valued member of the team, and we want every individual to have the skills and capabilities to achieve both your own personal goals and our business goals. We want good people to join our company, to help our company continue to go from strength to strength. If this sounds like you, please get in contact to learn more!

Seniority level

• Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

• Full‑time

Job function

• Management and Manufacturing
• Food and Beverage Manufacturing