Engineering Manager

Carolina Foods Inc.

Pineville, NC

Pay: $100,000/yr

Shift: Full time

**About Carolina Foods:**

Carolina Foods LLC produces high-quality Duchess branded and private-label bakery goods for retail customers nationwide. Based in Pineville in the Charlotte, North Carolina area, our bakery brings product development and manufacturing together, giving leaders a direct connection to the products, people, and decisions that drive our business.

Our people are central to our success. We value leaders who take pride in their work, share ideas, and build strong partnerships. Our commitment to safety, food safety and quality, operational excellence, and continuous improvement guides how we work and grow.

**Your Role as Head of Engineering:**

A hands-on engineering doer, not a program administrator. This role owns the plant's forward-looking improvement agenda, making existing lines better and building the capital pipeline that makes the plant fundamentally more capable and personally does the engineering work behind it: specs, FMEAs, business cases, and startup. It does not run day-to-day reactive maintenance or the plant's full legacy PM program. What it does own outright is the technical integrity of everything it touches: every project this person leads is engineered and commissioned to a real standard, not just installed and walked away from. Success looks like a live pipeline of improvement and capital projects, each with a credible business case, delivered on time and on budget, engineered to hold up, and with realized results tracked against what was promised.

**What this Role Is Not:**

Not a day-to-day reactive maintenance role, floor-level PM execution and shift standards stay with the Maintenance Lead. Not, on its own, a rebuild of the plant's entire legacy PM program across every existing asset, that comprehensive lift is a future Engineering Lead's mandate once the plant adds that seat. This role's reliability and FMEA discipline applies fully and personally to everything it touches, its own projects and the assets it's asked to dig into, not to the full inherited asset base on day one.

**Key Responsibilities:**

**Continuous Improvement Pipeline (Existing Lines)**

• Own the loss/opportunity Pareto for existing lines - OEE, yield, changeover time, rate, and labor productivity - and convert it into a prioritized improvement pipeline.
• Apply flow/constraint analysis (Theory of Constraints) to find the plant's true system constraint before proposing a fix, rather than optimizing a line in isolation.
• Lead structured improvement events (Kaizen/DMAIC) with cross-functional teams and put a control plan behind every completed improvement so gains are sustained and visible in the data months later.

**Capital Project Development, DesignJustification**

• Own capital project scoping, specification, and the business case - ROI/payback, cross-functional alignment with Finance, Operations, and Quality, and the formal approval (AFE) package.
• Build and prioritize the capital project pipeline against the plant's strategic priorities, in partnership with the COO and plant leadership.
• Lead vendor/OEM selection, design review, and installation oversight personally - this role is the plant's technical authority on its own projects, not a project manager coordinating someone else's engineering.

**Commissioning, ReliabilityStartup (Hands-On)**

• Personally treat every project as complete only once a real commissioning package is delivered: performance validated against design intent, a failure mode and criticality analysis (FMEA) completed, PM procedures and frequencies derived from that FMEA, spare parts strategy defined, and operating parameters (rate limits, setpoints) validated against real flow data - never assumed from a single output point.
• Lead or directly support root cause analysis on failures tied to this role's own projects or the plant's highest-impact assets, in partnership with the Maintenance Lead; reject "replaced the part" as a root cause.
• Own the formal handoff of new or modified equipment to the Maintenance Lead, including training, documentation, and a defined transition point before moving to the next project.
• Track realized results against the original business case for at least two full quarters post-startup and report the gap openly.

**What Matters Most**

**Required:**

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Industrial, Process, or Manufacturing Engineering, or equivalent hands-on experience in a highly automated manufacturing environment.
• Track record personally leading capital projects from spec through startup - not just coordinating others' engineering - ideally in food or CPG manufacturing.
• Demonstrated continuous improvement leadership (Lean, Six Sigma, or equivalent) with results tied to OEE, yield, or throughput gains.
• Working knowledge of FMEA, RCA methodology, and PM strategy development as engineering disciplines applied hands-on, not administered.
• Strong financial acumen - comfortable building and defending an ROI/payback case to Fin