Project Commercial Manager in London

At HDR, our employee-owners are fully engaged in creating a welcoming environment where each of us is valued and respected, a place where everyone is empowered to bring their authentic selves and novel ideas to work every day. We believe building engineering is more than systems and structures; it’s about powering progress and enabling innovation. As part of HDR’s Building Engineering Services Group, you’ll help design the critical infrastructure that supports the digital age and shapes the spaces where people work, connect, and thrive.

As a Project Commercial Manager, you will lead and manage the commercial and financial performance of projects from bid through to close-out, ensuring rigorous project cost control, accurate forecasting, effective risk and opportunity management, strong commercial governance, and delivery of agreed margin and profitability targets. The role is responsible for safeguarding project financial performance through proactive cost management, early intervention, and robust change control.

We are looking for a commercially astute, proactive and confident professional with strong interpersonal and leadership skills. You will be comfortable operating in a client-facing environment, able to influence at senior levels, and capable of managing commercial risk and opportunity across complex, multi-disciplinary projects.

Responsibilities include:

• Developing and owning project cost control plans, establishing cost baselines, budgets, recovery plans and key financial performance indicators.
• Monitoring project expenditure against budget on a monthly basis, identifying variances and implementing corrective actions to protect margin.
• Challenging project teams on resource utilisation, productivity, scope management and cost efficiency opportunities.
• Proactively identifying, quantifying and documenting scope changes, additional services and out-of-scope activities arising during project delivery.
• Working with Senior Project Managers and project teams to ensure all scope changes are promptly communicated to clients and managed in accordance with contractual notification and change management procedures.
• Maintaining a comprehensive change register, tracking the status, value and commercial recovery of all proposed and approved changes.
• Leading project cost reviews and commercial performance meetings, ensuring accountability for cost performance across project teams.
• Driving early identification of cost overruns and developing mitigation strategies to minimise adverse financial impacts.
• Establishing, managing and maintaining project budgets, forecasts, cash flow and financial reporting in line with internal and client requirements.
• Monitoring project performance against agreed commercial targets, identifying risks and opportunities and implementing mitigation or enhancement actions as required.
• Ensuring timely and accurate reporting of commercial performance to Project Managers, Programme Managers and senior management.

Skills and Requirements:

• Excellent presentation and communication skills.
• Extensive experience in commercial management of projects, minimum 10 years’ industry experience.
• Competency in MS Word, Excel, Outlook & PowerPoint.
• Educational qualifications to a degree level or equivalent are desired.
• Strong leadership and people management skills and experience.

Our commitment is to create an inclusive environment where each of us is welcomed, valued, respected and empowered to bring our authentic selves to work every day.