Commercial Support Lead in Colnbrook

The Role

At dnata, our Commercial team is responsible for winning and retaining the airline partnerships that power our business. As Commercial Support Lead, you will be the operational backbone of that team — bringing structure, rigour and momentum to the full lifecycle of our tenders, contracts and commercial projects. This is a role where excellence is built on precision and organisation. The majority of your time will be dedicated to managing, coordinating and maintaining critical commercial administration — ensuring every document, dataset and process is accurate, compliant and delivered on time. You’ll thrive here if you take genuine pride in getting the detail right: methodical in your approach, confident handling data, and naturally organised when juggling multiple priorities. You’ll collaborate closely with Finance, Operations, Legal and Pricing, while also engaging directly with airline customers and suppliers. Importantly, this is also a role with real opportunity — we’re looking for someone who can grow with the position, building capability, deepening commercial understanding and progressing their career over time.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Tender & Contract Management: You will play a central role in coordinating tender processes end-to-end, maintaining timelines, action logs and document registers with precision and consistency. A significant part of your role will focus on collating, reviewing and structuring inputs from across the business to produce high-quality, governance-compliant submissions. Alongside this, you’ll take ownership of contract administration — preparing and maintaining SGHAs, SLAs, addendums and subcontracts, with careful attention to version control and approvals. You’ll manage and continuously maintain a central contracts register, ensuring complete accuracy and visibility of renewal dates, notice periods, RPI clauses and key milestones, proactively tracking and escalating triggers. This is detail-driven work where organisation, control and accuracy are critical.
• Commercial Co‑ordination & Projects: You will act as the custodian of commercial data integrity, ensuring that contract, rate and opportunity data within Salesforce is consistently accurate and up to date. This includes producing regular reports and structured data summaries to support key commercial decisions such as renewals and bid/no‑bid activity. A large portion of your role will involve validating rate implementation against approved schedules, maintaining document libraries, and ensuring all commercial materials are current, accessible and compliant. You will also support the coordination of commercial initiatives, keeping stakeholders aligned and ensuring administrative deliverables are met on time.

What We’re Looking For

You don’t need prior aviation experience — but you do need to care deeply about accuracy, organisation and doing things properly. We’re looking for:

• Advanced Excel and strong data handling skills
• CRM experience (Salesforce preferred)
• Excellent written communication and document management capability
• Experience in commercial or contract administration, tender coordination or a regulated environment will be highly advantageous.
• Familiarity with SGHAs, SLAs or aviation frameworks is beneficial, but not essential.

How You’ll Show Up

You’ll be trusted with sensitive commercial information and expected to operate with discretion, professionalism and sound judgement. Success in this Role Comes From:

• Taking ownership of detailed administrative processes
• Maintaining high standards of accuracy and consistency
• Managing deadlines and priorities with discipline
• Proactively identifying and resolving issues early
• Collaborating effectively across teams

You’ll bring a calm, structured approach in a fast‑paced environment, building credibility through reliability and attention to detail, while actively building your own commercial knowledge and capability.

Who You’ll Work With

Internally, you’ll work closely with Commercial, Finance, Operations and Legal teams, as well as EXCO leadership. Externally, you’ll liaise with airline customers, suppliers and subcontractors.