Design Manager in London

The Background

Every industry has its quiet reckonings, moments where the work fundamentally changes shape because it has to. Building safety remediation is one of those for construction, and the businesses doing it well are building genuinely different skillsets to the ones that got them through the last decade. Fire strategy, facade build-ups, Gateway submissions, and a regulatory framework that didn't exist a few years ago and now sits at the centre of everything.

This is a principal contractor that's built a specialist practice around exactly that work: remediation, upgrade, and re-cladding across occupied residential buildings, mostly in London and the wider South East.

The design team is small and growing quickly, which means there's real room to shape how it operates rather than simply slotting into an existing structure. They're looking for a Design Manager to take charge of the design function across several live projects and help build the team as the business scales.

The Role

You'll lead the design side across multiple live residential remediation and re-cladding projects, coordinating consultants, designers, and specialist subcontractors from feasibility through to delivery. This is a role for someone who understands residential construction from a main contracting or housebuilding background, and who has taken the time to properly understand the Building Safety Act and the Gateway regime that now governs how this work gets approved and delivered.

What you'll be doing

• Taking ownership of the design function across several live building safety remediation and re-cladding projects at once.
• Managing and coordinating consultants, designers, and specialist subcontractors from feasibility through to delivery, keeping design intent intact as it moves through each stage.
• Driving technical submissions through Gateway 2 and Gateway 3, and keeping the Golden Thread complete and genuinely audit-ready rather than assembled retrospectively.
• Ensuring designs comply with residential building regulations, the Building Safety Act, and the wider building safety regime as it continues to evolve.
• Reviewing fire strategies, FRAEW and EWS assessments, and facade build-ups, and translating them into designs that are actually buildable on occupied or part-occupied buildings.
• Keeping the design programme aligned with the build programme, and flagging risk early rather than letting it surface on site.
• Working closely with the commercial, construction, and bid teams, and helping shape the design function's structure and process as the team grows around you.

What we're looking for

• A housebuilding or main contracting background, with solid design management experience behind you.
• Strong working knowledge of residential building regulations, applied practically rather than just understood in principle.
• A genuine grasp of the Building Safety Act, the building safety regime, and Gateway compliance, this isn't a discipline you can bluff your way through.
• Confidence coordinating multiple consultants and running design across more than one live project simultaneously.
• Communication skills strong enough to keep clients, designers, and site teams genuinely pulling in the same direction.
• Remediation, re-cladding, or facade experience is a real advantage, though not essential if everything else is strong.

What's on offer

• Up to £85,000 depending on experience, plus package and bonus.
• Hybrid working, with one to two days a week from home.
• A small, growing team where your input genuinely shapes how things get done, and real scope to step up as the business scales.
• Varied work across live residential building safety projects rather than a single repetitive scheme.
• Work with a tangible, human outcome: making homes demonstrably safer for the people living in them.

Ready to apply

If you understand both sides of this equation, solid residential design management and the regulatory world the Building Safety Act has created, and you want to help build a specialist team rather than join a finished one, drop me a message for a confidential chat about whether it's the right fit.