Manufacturing Area Lead

As Area Lead, you’ll take operational ownership of a defined manufacturing zone, ensuring production lines run safely, efficiently and in line with performance targets. You’ll oversee shift-level delivery across safety, quality, delivery and cost, managing throughput, yield and uptime while responding quickly to issues on the shop floor.

You’ll lead daily operations by ensuring pre-shift readiness, monitoring real-time performance data and driving immediate countermeasures where required. Acting as the first escalation point beyond Team Leaders, you’ll coordinate with Engineering, Maintenance, Quality and Logistics to resolve challenges and maintain flow.

This role is a hands on technical production role, working on the shop floor in the clean and dry room environments and becoming a SME in your selected area, working towards becoming the master trainer for your area.

Alongside this, you’ll play a key role in continuous improvement leading structured problem-solving, driving process adherence and embedding lean practices to improve performance across your area.

You’ll bring experience in a production leadership role within high-volume, automated manufacturing, with a strong understanding of process control, quality standards and shop floor operations.

You’ll be confident leading people and developing Team Leaders, with the ability to coach, drive accountability and maintain high performance standards. Strong problem-solving capability is essential, alongside experience using tools such as 5-Why, 8D or CAPA.

A strong technical knowhow and ability to understand complex manufacturing machery is essential.

You’ll also be comfortable working with manufacturing systems (MES, ERP, SPC) and using data to inform decisions, with a proactive mindset focused on continuous improvement.