Head of Contracts - Major Projects

Location to be agreed with the successful candidate. We’re seeking a Head of Contracts – Major Projects to play a critical leadership role within our Major Projects function at National Grid. This role carries commercial responsibility for a portfolio of circa £400m annual spend and will focus on building a new commercial team within Major Projects. You will design, implement, and embed commercial processes that enable effective cost control, value tracking, and robust measurement of progress against spend.

As a member of the Major Projects Leadership Team, you’ll help shape strategy and culture, ensuring cost consciousness, strong governance, and value delivery sit at the core of how we operate. This is a high‑impact role requiring strategic influence, strong commercial judgement, and the ability to drive meaningful transformation across a complex organisation. And because we know flexibility matters, this role offers a hybrid working approach—a mix of home and office working and you’ll also have the freedom to base yourself at any of our sites across the East Midlands, West Midlands, South West, or Wales, with travel to NGED locations 2–3 times a week.

Main Responsibilities

• Hold end‑to‑end commercial accountability for the Major Projects portfolio, with approximately £400m annual expenditure.
• Report to the Director of Major Projects, ensuring commercial strategy is aligned with wider business objectives.
• Build and lead a high‑performing commercial function within Major Projects, establishing clear cost control, progress measurement, and value tracking processes.
• Act as a key member of the Major Projects Leadership Team, contributing to strategy, performance, and cultural development.
• Set commercial standards and governance, owning commercial systems and embedding best‑practice processes and ways of working.
• Provide commercial expertise and thought leadership across supply chain and contracting topics.
• Drive change and transformation across the organisation, delivering consistent commercial discipline.
• Partner with Procurement to develop effective contracting strategies that embed cost and progress controls within supply chain contracts.
• Act as Commercial Counsel to the Major Projects Director, supporting financial target setting, budget development, and ongoing budget monitoring.
• Ensure compliance with contractual obligations, managing and resolving disputes as required.
• Lead performance reporting, budgeting, and governance processes to support effective decision‑making.

Ideal Candidate

• Proven experience in a Commercial Director, Head of Commercial, or similar senior commercial leadership role.
• Extensive experience leading commercial subject matter experts within an engineering or infrastructure environment.
• Demonstrated success building a new commercial function within an existing business.
• Strong experience managing, compiling, and controlling large, complex, multi‑million‑pound budgets.
• Proven capability in leading performance reporting and budgeting processes in comparable organisations.
• Strong analytical approach to complex commercial and contractual challenges.
• Deep knowledge of NEC4 contracts and programmatic contract management.
• Ability to influence strategically at all levels of the organisation and with external stakeholders.
• Track record of communicating compelling business cases and securing buy‑in for significant change.
• Strong people leadership skills, including coaching, developing talent, and creating cohesive, high‑performing teams.
• Commercial excellence underpinned by a strategic mindset.
• Excellent leadership, organisational, communication, and interpersonal skills.

About Us

We’re National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED), the owner and operator behind the electricity distribution systems for the Midlands, the Southwest of England and South Wales. Serving communities of more than 8 million people, our expert teams deliver heat, light and power for homes and businesses, working outdoors with underground cables, overhead lines and substations that operate between 230 and 132,000 volts. National Grid employs over 29,000 people worldwide. We are building an inclusive workplace, a place to actively celebrate the cultures, personalities and preferences of our colleagues – who in turn help to build the success of our business and reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. Our vision is to be at the heart of a clean, fair and affordable energy future and we are doing this in a fast-moving industry with an increasing focus on tackling climate change, exploring new energy sources that are renewable, low carbon, and improve efficiency to meet demand.