Assistant Engineering Manager

Are you an experienced engineering leader ready to take the next step in your career? AO Recycling is looking for an Assistant Engineering Manager to help drive maintenance excellence, improve asset performance, and support the continued growth of our state-of-the-art recycling operations. If you're passionate about reliability, motivated by leading people, and excited by technical challenges, this role is your chance to make a real impact. As our Assistant Engineering Manager, you'll play a key role in ensuring the safe, effective, and efficient delivery of all maintenance and engineering activities on site. You'll lead a team of Maintenance Supervisors and Technicians, ensuring maintenance is well-planned, well-executed, and supports our Lean Reliability Centred Maintenance (LRCM) strategy. You'll be a technical expert, supporting the team through breakdowns, urgent priorities, and engineering challenges. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll influence decision-making, support continuous improvement, and help drive equipment performance across our fast-paced recycling operation.Here's What You Can Expect To Be Doing

• Lead, manage and develop a team of 16 colleagues - making sure they're engaged and always performing to their best
• Work closely with the Engineering Manager to deliver the strategic engineering plan
• Planning, prioritising, and allocating maintenance work using the CMMS system
• Ensuring all PPE, safe operating procedures, and lock-out/tag-out processes are followed
• Acting as the technical lead, supporting breakdowns and urgent issues
• Ensuring plant equipment is optimised, modified, and improved to maximise uptime
• Overseeing contractors and ensuring safe, compliant, and high-standard work
• Managing stores, ensuring critical parts availability and excellent housekeeping
• Supporting Root Cause Analysis and driving improvement activities
• Providing maintenance performance updates to the Engineering Manager
• Attending daily operational reviews and working closely with production teams
• Supporting performance reviews, development, and competency assessments of Engineers
• Ensuring adherence to all company policies, procedures, and H&S standards
  
  You're an experienced and qualified engineer, with mechanical or electrical bias, and knowledge across lots of different areas. We'll also need you to have:
• Experience working in a production, or manufacturing environment.
• A desire to learn about the machinery and equipment we use here at AO Recycling, and really understand it's purpose
• Great communication and people skills - making sure everyone is working to their full potential, motivating others, and engaging people across the business
• An understanding of proactive maintenance strategies.
• Knowledge of CMMS systems, electrical/mechanical systems, and safe isolation procedures
• Experience leading engineering tasks or teams
• Excellent organisation skills, with the ability to plan your own workload and those of others (including external suppliers)
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment where new tasks can arise unexpectedly and require immediate attention
• Proactive and calm under pressure, maintaining accuracy and sound judgement even when dealing with high volumes of work
  
  AO is known as the destination for electricals, but we're also one of the UK's biggest recyclers of fridges and other Large Domestic Appliances (LDAs). We turn old fridges, washing machines, tumble dryers and dishwashers into valuable resources., We're big on appliances and electricals, REALLY big. Washing machines, fridge freezers and TVs? They're our bread and butter. Mobiles, Airwraps and Ring doorbells? Yep, those too. If it plugs in, powers up or makes life easier, AO probably has it.
But we're more than that… For over 25 years, trust has been at the heart of everything we do, helping us become the UK's most trusted electrical retailer. Our customers rate us 4.9 on Trustpilot from nearly ONE MILLION reviews and more 5-star ratings than any other UK electrical retailer, because they know they can rely on us and it's the exact same for our AOers too. We truly believe it's more than just a job, we genuinely care about each other and our impact on making our customers lives easier, by helping them brilliantly. Everyone here knows how their role makes a difference. Our people are our superpower, so, when it comes to finding new AOers, we know it's about more than just a CV, it's about what makes you, YOU.

Our benefits are designed to cover the moments that matter to AOers. From health and wellness to giving back - you'll be rewarded inside and outside of work.
• Holidays; 25 days holiday
• Pension; Contribute 5% of your annual salary and we'll do the same, giving you a little extra support for the future.
• Be a VIP at the AO Arena; we have loads of opportunities to win free tickets and pre-sale access!
• Health & wellbeing; discounted gym membership, and our Help @ Hand scheme giving you access to virtual GP's, Mental Health support and much more.
• Discounts; exclusive discounts across our product range.
• Family leave; Enhanced Maternity, Paternity and Adoption leave.
• Making a difference; 2 fully paid days a year to donate your time to any charity of your choice.
• Free Food Thursday - Last Thursday of every month, lunch is on us as a way of saying thank you for your efforts!, Surname
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That's great! We'd love to know more about you! How do you describe your gender identity? How do you describe your ethnic background? How do you like to describe your sexual identity or sexual orientation? Do you identify as a person with a disability or are you a person with accessibility needs? How would you describe your Neurodiversity?Great! Do you require any reasonable adjustments if we were to invite you to an interview? Reasonable adjustmentsWhat are reasonable adjustments? We want to make sure you have the best possible experience throughout our recruitment journey. If there's anything we can do to make the process more comfortable or accessible, like arranging a ground floor meeting room for an interview or having a sign language interpreter join you, please let us know below. We're here to support you every step of the way. If this role was recommended to you by someone already working at AO, please tick the box and let us know their name. Referrer First Name Referrer Last Name By ticking, this means you are giving us your permission to keep in touch with you over the next 12 months using the information you have submitted. We will share content with you every now and then about AO and update you on relevant job opportunities. To opt out at any point, please email careers@ao.comYour applications in! One of our recruitment team will be in touch soon with an update as soon as they can. In the meantime, why not check out what life at AO is all about! Explore Now Current / last job title
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• Takes just 2 minutes to complete!AO is for everyone! We should all feel that we belong. That's why we are creating a welcoming and inclusive place to work. We're proud to be different. From how we look to the way we talk to our customers, we skip to the beat of our very own drum. We know that being different together is our superpower and we celebrate it because it makes us stronger, more creative, and better at what we do. We believe the people we employ should reflect the diversity of our customer base; that way, we can communicate in a way that recognises all backgrounds, races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, abilities, and sexual orientations. And that's why we're asking these questions. Making sure our recruitment process is inclusive is a key part of what we're doing at AO to encourage diversity as an employer. Read more How will we use the data? After we've collated the data, we'll look at the patterns to assess if we are inclusive at each stage. If it turns out that we aren't, then the data may help us identify where we can improve. The data collated won't have any impact on your application and is not shared with hiring managers or the recruitment team.