Engineering & Hygiene Manager

Salary: £62,000
Location: Gravesend
Shift: Monday to Friday | Nights | 5:00pm - 5:00am

A leading UK food manufacturer is looking to appoint an experienced Hygiene & Engineering Manager to lead its night shift operation. This is a senior leadership opportunity within a fast-paced FMCG environment, where you'll be responsible for driving engineering reliability, food safety, hygiene excellence and operational performance across the site.

Working closely with senior site leadership, you'll oversee both the Engineering and Hygiene functions during night operations, ensuring compliance with food safety standards while delivering continuous improvement and exceptional operational standards.

As the senior manager on site during nights, you will:

• Lead Engineering and Hygiene teams to deliver safe, efficient and compliant operations.
• Coordinate planned engineering activities to maximise equipment reliability and minimise downtime.
• Ensure all machinery is maintained to the highest safety and maintenance standards.
• Deliver the site's hygiene strategy, ensuring all production areas remain audit-ready.
• Manage hygiene validation processes including ATP testing, environmental swabbing, allergen controls and cleaning verification.
• Maintain cleaning schedules, SSOPs and hygiene documentation to meet customer and industry standards.
• Lead investigations into incidents, implement corrective actions and promote a proactive safety culture.
• Monitor and improve departmental KPIs including hygiene performance, engineering reliability, chemical usage and labour efficiency.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives using structured problem-solving methodologies.
• Act as the senior decision-maker on site during night shifts, supporting operational continuity and emergency response when required.

We're looking for an experienced leader with a strong background in food manufacturing who can motivate teams and deliver results in a demanding production environment.

You'll ideally have:

• Proven leadership experience within Engineering, Hygiene or Operations in an FMCG manufacturing environment.
• Experience within chilled, high-care or short shelf-life food production.
• Strong knowledge of food safety legislation, BRCGS standards and hygiene best practice.
• Excellent understanding of microbiological, allergen, chemical and foreign body risks.
• Experience using KPIs, audits and continuous improvement tools such as RCA, 5 Whys, PDCA, Lean or Kaizen.
• Excellent communication and people management skills with experience leading multi-skilled teams.
• Strong IT skills including Microsoft Office.

• Minimum HNC in Engineering.
• HACCP Level 3.
• Food Safety Level 3.
• COSHH Assessor qualification or IOSH Managing Safely.

• High-profile UK retail customer standards and audits.
• ATP testing, cleaning validation and digital hygiene systems.
• QMS software.
• Lean, Six Sigma or Green/Yellow Belt qualifications.
• Hygienic engineering design and root cause analysis.
• Site expansions, factory change projects or customer onboarding.

• £62,000 salary.
• Monday to Friday night shift (5:00pm-5:00am).
• Modern manufacturing facility with excellent working environment.
• On-site parking with electric vehicle charging.
• Subsidised staff restaurant.
• Company-funded staff events.
• Early access to earned wages before payday.
• Supportive leadership team with genuine opportunities for development and progression.

If you're an experienced Engineering or Hygiene leader looking to take ownership of a critical night operation within a growing food manufacturing business, we'd love to hear from you.