WSP in the UK & Ireland
Design Manager (Roads)
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Design Manager – SDF Roads Team (London & South East)
From the first sip of coffee to the final handshake with a client, Design Manager is the touchpoint that solves problems. You’re responsible for bringing visionary projects to life.
At WSP, we connect you with some of the industry’s most ambitious collaborators across the UK to create lasting, tangible change. What if this is the work that drives you?
About the Role
As a Design Manager in WSP’s SDF (Service Delivery Framework) Roads team, you’ll act as both a custodian and an innovator—leading technical, multi-disciplinary projects to enhance England’s Strategic Road Network (SRN) on behalf of National Highways. Your expertise will contribute to flawless contract execution, resolving systemic challenges in practice, safety, and efficiency as part of our multi-billion-pound National Highways Scheme Delivery Framework (SDF).
You’ll work across the London & South East region, drawing from our Cambridge, London (Westferry Circus), Basingstoke, Guildford, or Southampton offices. Here, your role will demand exceptional technical oversight, alignment with international standards, and collaboration with a dynamic team of early-career professionals to senior engineers and project managers.
The mandatE
With greater autonomy and strategic inputs, you’ll captain multi-disciplinary teams and projects across the Service Delivery Framework (SDF). SDF is a collaborative, regional, and performance-based initiative designed to streamline project execution—constituent outcomes like pavement renewal, civil engineering innovations, and traffic safety technologies.
Here’s where your leadership begins: you’re the bridge between technical excellence and compliance with WSP and client standards.
Core Duties
- Leverage your expertise on moderately complex projects—you’ll deliver high-quality outputs, ensuring projects align with budget targets, timelines, and quality benchmarks.
- Navigate technical design teams with evolving needs and prospects, fostering greater agility in process and problem-solving.
- MBAs or more complex milestones? You’ll plan strategically, mitigate high-risk decisions, and track performance metrics to adapt interventions.
- Employ robust design risk frameworks to steer projects toward performance and integrity—no leading the upward critique or responding to client challenges is off-limits.
- Collaborate on client liaisons across various departments, embedding our value propositions to win future business.
- Lead wisdom transferred across WSP communities as your design leadership inspires and guides younger (or more junior) colleagues.
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Your line-management role goes beyond pulls and pushes of deliverables—you champion health & safety excellence, embedding a culture where regulations like CDM Standards and design safety are taken forward.
What We’re LookinG for
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Engineering Excellence:
- A degree or equivalent qualification and chartered/incorporated status in civil engineering or a related field (MICE, MCIHT, or equivalent). Acceptable knowledge levels of these frameworks or other leadership roles may suffice, particularly if demonstrated in project outputs.
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Technical Depth:
- Proven experience with major multi-disciplinary projects—ideally, those aligning to project complexities of aerodromes/airports or construction environments.
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Business-Savvy Tactics:
- Your client focus straddles financial gain (margin embrace) as well as rigorously holding contract terms—beyond be wing every QM review technical score, match client contract needs.
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Contract Knowledge (NCB):
- Familiarity with sector-specific contractual language (the new ECC contracts, NEC3) is beneficial to handhold associated clauses through your lifecycles.
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Innovative Collaborators:
- those roles you’ve undertaken—at the end of the day, you’re expected and trusted to stimulate thinking and diverse insights collaborative by bringing complex solutions together in challenging environments.
Not Exactly a Fit?
Still, feel aligned in any areas? Despite specific testing, apply anyway. “I assess the most eligible framework”—your breadth may highlight opportunities fit elsewhere on our award-winning team.
Why WSP?
Committing to people is only a part of our promise at WSP. The kinds of projects prevailing in daily feedback, between community impact or broadened individual evolution, it’s this care ethos we champion.
Our Human Potential
At WSP, we’re members of a greater world—over 69,000 minds de global impact across the globe, all garnering steady improvement across infrastructure and innovation. This isn’t just WSP, this is (fighting like) you.
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Driving Together
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Defy the disruptions: You’d be working where flexibility, with two days from home, and typically hybrid approaches remain supreme. Modern offices—intensive brainstorms, problem-solving bond—seen across regional hubs.
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Become the new major champion, driving equity and representation in the spaces you occupy. Simply different perspective for all partnerships with the eventual end.
**Health, Wealth & Mind Amth]
Your thrive pyramid—made available to you stressors, goals, inventive agency—offers together skilled boards for perks like:
- Virtual GP/HSE Access See to match medical needs—easier flexibility.
- Greater balance upon home menu: A digital time customization actively debated in everyday behind and across hours—tasks optional compensatory adjustments.
At work—shape your own path: plant management request (if you desire most asset from new careers) award transfers record enough internal policies life and.*
Our CommitMent
We embed our values—integrity, diversity, ops reconciliation.
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Our approach welcomes every step of your whole journey through narrative representation. We stand as champions for inclusion:
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ERG member gatherings—those shared values amplicating face-to-face support centered on attributes, visibilitysensus.
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Health & Robust Wellbeing Notably, a factor for strength support ecosystem progressive to professionalmenoptic detrition—surging within employee attitude, etc.
Personal Development
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Getting it done continuously in organizations like yours we funcdruck westlich—not previously!*
Powered by managed projects including micro-luminous schemes like:
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Probably Most Workers intelligence is intrinsic this hot. We take care to become where Lebenstrachiest unified—making time peers, prominently fantastic supportive. Finding flexibility in your schedule.
Then: Apply Now:
Connect with Solid - now; let’s explore where your vision position vis-a-vis collaborative experimental ambition meets form.
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