Asset Care Lead

Job description

Overview

At PepsiCo 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. The Asset Care Lead acts as the primary link between Operations and Engineering, providing technical leadership, maintenance coaching and execution support to eliminate losses, improve asset performance and sustain site reliability objectives.

The role leads the Asset Care team, drives proactive maintenance improvement activities, supports root cause investigations, coordinates maintenance shutdown activities and ensures compliance with engineering, safety and maintenance standards.

Responsibilities

Lead the day-to-day Asset Care function, ensuring engineering resources are effectively deployed to maximise equipment reliability, maintenance effectiveness and operational performance. Coordinate Asset Care resources with the Reliability Manager, Maintenance Leads and Maintenance Planners to support planned outages, shutdowns and business priorities. Drive proactive maintenance and fault elimination activities to improve equipment reliability, reduce downtime and eliminate repeat failures.

Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to maintenance technicians and engineers to improve intervention quality, speed and effectiveness. Lead and support Root Cause Analysis, IDA investigations and structured problem-solving activities to eliminate chronic equipment losses. Own maintenance execution standards, ensuring work orders, maintenance records and SAP data are completed accurately and to required standards.

Support planning and execution of major equipment overhauls, shutdown activities and critical maintenance interventions. Ensure engineering activities are conducted safely and in compliance with company standards, permit-to-work requirements and site procedures. Identify technical capability gaps and support development plans to improve engineering competence across the Asset Care population. Provide visible engineering leadership and act as the first escalation point for technical issues, complex breakdowns and equipment performance concerns.

Qualifications

Essential Advanced Level 3 Engineering Apprenticeship. Recognized Mechanical or Electrical qualification. Strong electro-mechanical fault-finding capability. Experience in maintenance leadership within a manufacturing environment. Demonstrated experience leading technical problem-solving and root cause analysis activities. Strong understanding of preventive and predictive maintenance principles. Experience using SAP PM or equivalent maintenance management systems.

Ability to coach, develop and hold engineering teams accountable for performance. Effective communication and stakeholder management skills. Strong understanding of safety and compliance requirements within manufacturing operations. Desirable FMCG manufacturing experience. Lean Six Sigma or continuous improvement experience. Experience supporting utilities and facilities maintenance. Knowledge of reliability improvement methodologies and asset care best practices.

Why Join Us? We offer a competitive salary, 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. 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.