Engineering – Engineering Planner

Location: Kara Foodservice, Manchester
Shift: Monday – Friday
Salary: Competitive

We have a new opportunity for an experienced Engineering Planner within our Engineering Team who would be based at Kara Foodservice, in Manchester.
We’re looking for a highly organised, analytical and proactive individual who can take ownership of maintenance planning and play a key role in driving asset reliability across the site. As Engineering Planner, you’ll be central to ensuring our production lines run safely, efficiently and with minimal downtime by developing and optimising maintenance schedules that support operational excellence.
Finsbury Food Group is a leading speciality bakery manufacturer. We constantly raise quality and efficiency standards, and build long-term relationships with major multiple retailers and the foodservice channel. 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.

This is what you’ll actually do!
You will be responsible for developing, planning and optimising preventive, predictive and corrective maintenance activities through the CMMS to ensure the reliability, safety and performance of production assets. Working closely with Engineering Shift Leads, Production Managers and Technicians, you’ll prioritise maintenance schedules based on asset criticality, safety and operational needs.
A key part of your role will be creating detailed job plans that include labour, materials, tools, permits and timings to support efficient maintenance execution. You’ll lead weekly planning meetings to align engineering, production and contractor priorities, ensuring all work is coordinated and ready for safe execution.
You will analyse maintenance history, downtime trends and asset performance to improve future scheduling and support reliability improvements. You’ll maintain accurate asset data, BOMs, job plans, risk assessments and compliance documentation within the CMMS, while supporting the site’s spare parts strategy and stock optimisation.
This role also involves coordinating planned engineering interventions, small shutdowns and capital upgrade activities to minimise disruption. You’ll support root cause analysis and continuous improvement activities, helping to reduce failure frequency and severity.
You will monitor and report on key engineering KPIs including schedule compliance, planned vs unplanned work ratio, downtime hours and MTBF. Ensuring all planned tasks uphold Health & Safety, Food Safety and environmental standards is essential, as is managing contractor scheduling, documentation and compliance.
You will also provide mentoring and technical guidance to junior planners/schedulers and contribute to the site’s maintenance excellence strategy through TPM, reliability engineering and progressive maintenance approaches. Additional duties may be required to support the Reliability Manager or Engineering Manager.

Ideally this is you!

• Recognised engineering qualification or relevant maintenance planning experience
• Experience in maintenance planning within a manufacturing environment (bakery/FMCG preferred)
• Strong understanding of preventive, predictive and reliability-centred maintenance
• Advanced CMMS knowledge and experience managing asset data and engineering workflows
• Good understanding of bread manufacturing processes, machinery and mechanical/electrical systems
• Experience planning maintenance shutdowns and coordinating contractors
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret downtime data and maintenance trends
• Excellent organisational and scheduling skills
• Experience using KPIs to measure maintenance performance and drive improvements
• Strong knowledge of Health & Safety, permit-to-work and Food Safety requirements
• Competent in Microsoft Office and maintenance planning tools
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Ability to influence, challenge and drive best practice across engineering teams
• Continuous improvement mindset with understanding of LEAN/TPM principles

What’s in it for you!
• 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!
• Company shop available at sites (heavily discounted, yummy products!)
• Refer a Friend Scheme (up to £300 per referral – T&Cs 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!