Line Engineering Lead

Overview

At Pepsi Co UK, we’re proud to make some of the nation’s favourite snacks and drinks—like Walkers, Quaker, Doritos, Pipers, and Monster Munch. With sites across the UK, including our Quaker mill in Cupar and Doritos factory in Coventry, we’re also home to one of the world’s largest crisp factories in Leicester. At the end of 2025 we will move our UK office to a vibrant new Reading town centre location, just minutes from Reading train station.

Why Join Us?

We offer a competitive salary, bonus, car allowance, flexible working, and a wide range of benefits—from critical illness cover and discounted gym memberships to enhanced parental leave and electric car schemes. Our commitment to wellbeing and career growth makes us a Top Employer for 14 years running.

The role of the Line Engineering Lead is to implement and/or to maintain and continuously improve the maintenance planning and scheduling (MPS) and breakdown elimination (BDE) daily management system (DMS) for their area, to coach line teams to improve technical ability, and to provide a continuity link to other Progressive Maintenance (PM) systems.

• Ensuring production lines are not constrained by a lack of technical capability or knowledge.

• Planning, organizing, and executing all maintenance tasks efficiently and at optimal cost.

• Transferring knowledge to line teams and ensuring the required skills and qualifications to deploy loss elimination capabilities.

• Coaching, teaching, and assessing the implementation of Progressive Maintenance (PM) and Autonomous Maintenance (AM) steps.

• Planning and scheduling maintenance work, including reviewing and prioritizing SAP work orders and notifications within 24 hours.

• Maintaining an up-to-date maintenance work order backlog, sorted for reporting and aligned with compelling business needs (CBN).

• Tracking, analyzing, and reporting maintenance indicators and in-process measures.

• Managing equipment design change proposals and ensuring adherence to corrective maintenance and change management (CM) procedures.

• Developing improvement plans based on maintenance indicators and in-process performance tracking.

• Identifying losses and defining improvement themes to eliminate them.

• Owning, developing, and tracking improvement theme action plans.

• Championing and leading the continuous improvement (CI) process.

• Reducing breakdowns caused by improper maintenance, overhaul, or restoration procedures.

• Optimizing scheduled maintenance to reduce downtime and support line goals and business needs.

• Updating standards and procedures while reducing maintenance costs (parts and labor) in line with budget.

• Increasing planned maintenance to ensure controlled, predictable equipment performance.

• Having experience in an FMCG or similar production/manufacturing environment.

• Influencing technicians, line operation leads, and process engineers as required.

• Teaching, coaching, and developing others.

• Demonstrating strong on-the-floor technical credibility with operational teams.

• Communicating effectively, including active listening, constructive challenge, and appropriate assertiveness.

• Demonstrating passion for continuous improvement and loss elimination.

• Committing to ongoing self-development required for the role.

• Applying Integrated Work System (IWS) and operational experience, or rapidly building capability aligned to the plant’s current phase.

• Operating manufacturing equipment and owning a line, area, or specific equipment as required.

• Demonstrating flexibility by flowing to the work, covering training and breaks, and supporting delivery of line KPIs.

• Participating actively in planned stops and changeovers (COs).

• Possessing Work Process Improvement (WPI) Level 4 capability (highly desirable).

A Space to be You

We celebrate individuality and are committed to building an inclusive workplace. Our Employee Resource Groups help embed inclusion into our culture, ensuring everyone feels valued and heard.

Equal Opportunities

We’re an equal opportunity employer, committed to the Equality Act 2010. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and will provide any necessary adjustments to support you through the recruitment process.

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