Manufacturing Team Lead

What if the products your team manufacture genuinely had to work first time, every time?

We’re recruiting a Manufacturing Team Leader for a well-established UK engineering organisation designing and manufacturing highly specialised, safety-critical products.

This is an opportunity to lead a team of engineers in a low-volume, high-complexity manufacturing environment, where engineering decisions have a genuine impact on product safety, quality and performance. We're interested in finding someone with strong manufacturing or production engineering experience who understands what good engineering looks like within a highly regulated, safety-critical environment.

You’ll lead a team of 10 engineers, providing both technical and people leadership while remaining closely connected to manufacturing operations. This isn't a role where you’ll spend your entire week in management meetings.

You’ll be working with your team and the wider manufacturing operation to:

• Solve complex production and manufacturing problems
• Lead investigations into quality issues and implement corrective actions
• Improve manufacturing processes, tooling and production resources
• Support the introduction and production of critical products
• Identify and deliver engineering improvement and capital projects
• Prioritise engineering activity around production requirements
• Develop the capability of your team through coaching, training and succession planning
• Ensure engineering processes remain safe, controlled and appropriately documented

The formal remit includes production engineering, quality/rework control, tooling, production resources and capital projects, alongside responsibility for developing and managing the engineering team.

You’ll probably already be working as a Manufacturing Engineering Team Leader, Production Engineering Team Leader, Lead Manufacturing Engineer, Manufacturing Engineering Manager or in a similar engineering leadership position.

We’re particularly interested in people who can demonstrate:

• Strong manufacturing or production engineering experience
• Experience leading and developing engineers or technical teams
• A background in a highly regulated or safety-critical environment
• Strong root-cause investigation and problem-solving skills
• Experience improving manufacturing processes
• An ability to balance technical problem-solving with people leadership
• Confidence working closely with Production, Quality and other engineering functions

You might currently work within aerospace, defence, nuclear, automotive, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, chemical/process manufacturing or another highly regulated engineering environment.

What matters is your ability to lead an engineering team in an environment where safety, quality and attention to detail cannot be compromised.

You’ll be joining an established British engineering organisation producing highly specialised technology used in safety-critical aerospace applications.

You’ll have a team to lead, real engineering problems to solve and the opportunity to influence how complex products are manufactured—not simply manage KPIs from behind a desk.