Senior Lead, Research & Insights in London

The Senior Capability Lead is a pivotal leadership role responsible for the successful delivery of projects within a defined capability area. This includes owning and evolving the delivery approaches, processes, skills, and technology requirements that underpin the research capability. The role ensures research delivery excellence, fosters innovation, and drives continuous improvement across the portfolio.

Key Results for this role include:

• Research Scalability & AI enablement: Productise core research offers to support repeatable, sustainable delivery. Identify opportunities to improve quality and efficiency using automation where appropriate, and increase wellbeing for the team.
• Cross-Portfolio working: Deploy research capability into other projects to shape their delivery approaches and provide systems-level thinking for our customers.
• Thought Leadership: Identify team insights and capability to position Plexal as a key player in mission-critical technology areas.
• Research Partnerships: (Re) build partnerships with consultancy or academic channel partners.
• Adoption: Research outputs demonstrably used in downstream delivery or client decisions.

What You'll Do

• Capability Ownership: Define and maintain the strategic direction for the capability, including its scope, value proposition, and alignment with organisational goals. Own and evolve the delivery methodology, tooling, and quality standards for the capability. Act as the internal champion for the capability, ensuring it is well understood and effectively leveraged across the business.
• Project Delivery: Oversee the quality of the delivery of projects within the capability, ensuring they meet expectations. Provide delivery assurance and oversight, including risk management, resource planning, and stakeholder engagement. Support the mobilisation of new projects and ensure smooth transitions between sales and delivery.
• Quality & Performance: Set and uphold quality standards across all workstreams within the capability. Monitor delivery performance and implement continuous improvement initiatives. Conduct regular reviews and retrospectives to identify lessons learned and embed best practices.
• Governance & Portfolio Reporting: Establish and maintain governance frameworks to ensure consistent, transparent, and accountable delivery practices. Track and report on portfolio performance, including KPIs, delivery health, risks, and dependencies. Provide regular updates to senior leadership and stakeholders, offering insights and recommendations for strategic decision-making. Ensure compliance with internal controls, audit requirements, and external standards where applicable.
• People & Skills Development: Line manage and mentor capability-aligned team members, supporting their development and progression. Identify skills gaps and lead targeted interventions to build capability maturity. Support onboarding and upskilling of new joiners within the capability. Ensure teams are appropriately resourced to ensure they can meet their development and growth objectives.
• Collaboration & Influence: Work closely with Directors, Account Leads, and other Capability Leads to ensure integrated delivery across portfolios. Represent the capability in internal forums and external engagements as needed. Identify opportunities for thought leadership and innovation within the capability domain.

Your Skills

• Proven qualitative and quantitative research skills e.g. end-to-end research design, research question/challenge scoping, interviews, surveys, market research, data analysis.
• Ability to define and scale research delivery methodologies, including setting quality frameworks and KPIs.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled research tools and automations to enhance research efficiency, where appropriate.
• Synthesis of complex research into clear, engaging and accurate outputs suitable for advising and making recommendations to senior leaders, in particular for the public sector.
• Ability to work proactively - planning and organising your own work with reference to appropriate strategies, policies, processes and protocols, and drawing from appropriate team members as needed.
• Commercial acumen including shaping research propositions, and an aptitude for building relationships, nurturing opportunities and structuring mutually beneficial partnerships.
• Excellent listening, facilitating and influencing skills, including influencing senior leaders and external stakeholders and negotiating to achieve desired outcomes.

Your Experience

• Research, innovation or technology background, with a passion about emerging technology and some domain expertise or interest in technology policy.
• Experience with a range of research methodologies (both qualitative and quantitative), and an ability to critically assess research to draw insightful conclusions and recommendations for the client, presented in an accessible and compelling narrative.
• Experience leading a team, capability or portfolio of work, including setting direction and overseeing delivery quality.
• Experience providing delivery oversight, including risk management and resource planning across multiple projects.
• Experience of working successfully through collaboration, contributing to the success of a delivery team.
• Evidence of building trust-based relationships with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders such as startups and corporate clients as well as understanding the practicalities of working in a small and growing company.
• A proven ability to be able to provide a credible, outside-in perspective to clients with regards to emerging market needs, trends, opportunities and technologies of interest to explore.
• Experience developing repeatable research frameworks or tool kits to support scalable delivery desirable.
• Higher Education degree, or equivalent knowledge gained via work experience. (Essential)
• SC or DV clearance desirable.

Who You Are

• A passion for and understanding of emerging technologies (e.g. AI, quantum, biotechnology, cyber, IoT) and the innovative startups that exist in this space.
• The ability to balance rigour and flexibility to maximise impact.
• Flexible when it comes to working within a matrix structure with changing organisational and operational requirements.
• Personal resilience and the ability to remain focused on the overall objective, responding to challenges in a calm and measured manner.

This role may require some national travel for delivery of projects and travel to all Plexal sites. Due to the nature of this position, our work, and our client engagements, you must be willing and eligible to achieve a minimum of SC clearance. To qualify for SC clearance, you must be a British Citizen or have resided in the UK for the last 5 years with no extensive periods outside of the UK. Pre-existing SC welcome.

Why us?

• Plexal’s Values:
• Mission: We inherit the mission of UK government and deliver it in an agile and creative fashion.
• Collaboration: We believe in the power of working together.
• Equality: We strengthen ourselves as a team by embracing the different.
• Care: People are at the heart of what we do; we care about our customers, members and colleagues.

As a start-up, we thrive in a dynamic and fast-paced work environment dedicated to empowering innovators. We embrace individuals who leverage technology and creativity to tackle our greatest challenges head-on. We strongly advocate for maintaining a harmonious work-life balance, our goal is to ensure every member of our team can authentically be themselves and live their best lives. We firmly believe that innovation and creativity flourish when we cultivate a diverse workforce, comprising highly skilled individuals with a wide range of perspectives to contribute.

In return we will offer you:

• Salary: £80,000 - £100,000 depending on skills and experience.
• Annual bonus scheme.
• A generous pension scheme (with a company contribution of up to 10%).
• Private healthcare, life assurance and critical illness cover.
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.
• Volunteering day.

Plexal is an equal opportunities employer and we actively encourage applicants from individuals from all backgrounds. We are a Disability Committed employer and are willing to make reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process.

About us: Plexal is the innovation and growth company helping to strengthen the UK’s technology capabilities through collaboration. With teams in London, Manchester and Cheltenham, we work closely with government, industry, startups and academia to drive economic growth and reinforce national security. Founded by Delancey in 2017, Plexal delivers four core services: creating workspaces for innovators, running innovation programmes and consultancy, building regional tech clusters and helping SMEs scale strategically. By closing the gap between early-stage and established organisations – across the public and private sectors at home and abroad – we’ve impacted over 1,200 businesses, added £731m to the UK economy and helped create 9,400 jobs. Headquartered at Here East on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Plexal partners with organisations including the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the National Cyber Security Centre, Airbus, Amazon, Barclays Eagle Labs, Google Cloud, TfL, The Alan Turing Institute and the University of Oxford.