Vector Homes
Architect & Development Lead
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Role Overview
Most architects are asked to design. Most business development people are asked to sell. This role combines the two.
Vector Homes is looking for an ARB registered architect who can assess a difficult site, shape a credible scheme, lead the client conversation, and keep delivery moving.
Approximately half of the role is hands-on architectural work. The other half is split between project development, client relationships, and work winning.
This is not a pure studio position and it is not a high-volume sales role. It is for an architect who wants broader responsibility, direct access to the founders, and a genuine route into business leadership.
About Vector Homes
Vector Homes is the small site specialist for UK housing associations. We turn garage courts, infill plots, backland parcels, and overlooked land into deliverable homes.
Small sites fail for predictable reasons. Design becomes too bespoke. Planning absorbs too much time. Consultant and contractor coordination becomes disproportionate to scheme size. We solve this through standardized design, rapid feasibility, streamlined planning, and trusted delivery partners.
The Role in One Sentence
Turn constrained sites and client relationships into viable, consentable, and deliverable housing projects.
How the Role Divides
- 50% Architecture and design
- 25% Project development
- 25% Client development and work winning
What You Will Own
The balance will move with the pipeline, but the role remains deliberately broad. You will be expected to move between a drawing review, a consultant meeting, a client pitch, and a commercial decision without losing rigor.
Architecture and Design
- Carry out rapid site feasibility, constraints, and opportunity assessments.
- Develop site layouts and concept designs using Vector Homes' standardized house types, adapting them intelligently to planning, context, access, and viability.
- Produce and coordinate planning submissions, design reports, technical information, and visual material across the relevant RIBA stages.
- Maintain design quality, regulatory compliance, buildability, cost awareness, and consistency across the product platform.
- Coordinate and review the work of external architects, technologists, engineers, and specialist consultants where required.
- Improve the design library, templates, standards, and repeatable workflows that allow small schemes to move faster.
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Project Development and Management
- Lead projects from the first site conversation through concept, viability, planning, and delivery preparation, with involvement during construction and handover where required.
- Translate client objectives into clear briefs, scopes, programmes, responsibilities, and decision points.
- Appoint and coordinate planning consultants, engineers, surveyors, ecologists, cost consultants, manufacturers, and contractors.
- Chair meetings, maintain action and risk registers, drive decisions, and provide concise, board-ready reporting.
- Manage fees, appointments, change control, programme, and project economics with the founding team.
- Identify delivery risks early and resolve them before they become expensive.
Client Development and Work Winning
- Build trusted relationships with housing associations, local authorities, landowners, consultants, and delivery partners, with an initial focus on the North West.
- Identify and qualify sites and opportunities, then convert early conversations into paid feasibility, planning, and delivery commissions.
- Lead technical client meetings, site reviews, workshops, and presentations.
- Prepare proposals, tender responses, framework submissions, and pitch materials.
- Maintain a disciplined pipeline and CRM, with clear next actions and realistic probabilities.
- Represent Vector Homes at sector events, roundtables, and targeted networking activity.
What You Bring
This is an associate-level scope without the distance from delivery that often comes with a traditional associate role. Capability matters more than title history.
Essential
- Current ARB registration and the legal right to use the title architect in the UK.
- Strong post-Part 3 experience, likely around four to eight years, with evidence of capability more important than exact tenure.
- UK residential project experience, including concept design, planning, and job running.
- A track record of coordinating multidisciplinary teams and driving projects through ambiguity.
- Strong site planning, planning policy, design, technical, and visual communication skills.
- High proficiency in a leading BIM or CAD platform, ideally Revit, plus the ability to produce clear client material.
- Confidence with senior clients and the judgement to challenge constructively.
- Evidence of supporting work winning, proposals, tenders, or client account development.
- Commercial awareness across scope, fees, programme, risk, and viability.
- A hands-on approach. You will shape the system and also do the work.
- Ability to travel regularly to client and project sites.
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Advantageous
- Existing relationships within housing associations, local authorities, affordable housing, residential development, or the North West consultant market.
- Experience of constrained sites, infill, garage courts, backland, or estate regeneration.
- Knowledge of modern methods of construction, off-site manufacture, panelized systems, or standardized housing products.
- Experience of public sector procurement, frameworks, and tendering.
- Familiarity with development appraisals, cost plans, contract administration, or construction stage delivery.
What Success Looks Like
First 90 Days
- Understand the Vector system, own site screens and concepts, contribute actively in client meetings, and take control of live project actions.
By Month 6
- Lead projects and consultant teams independently, own named accounts and opportunities, and improve templates and delivery controls.
By Month 12
- Deliver consistently strong schemes and planning submissions, convert relationships into paid work and repeat commissions, and act as a trusted technical and commercial lead.
What Vector Homes Offers
- Broad responsibility across architecture, project development, and growth.
- A direct working relationship with the founders and faster decisions than a conventional practice.
- The freedom to shape design standards, project controls, tools, and ways of working.
- Meaningful work that unlocks housing from sites others overlook.
- A salary of £40,000 to £45,000, depending on experience.
- Hybrid working from a Manchester base, with regular client and site travel.
- Support for ARB fees and relevant continuing professional development.
- Scope to grow into a broader leadership role as the business and project pipeline scale.
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