Rowden
Senior Project Manager
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Senior Project Manager
Department: Project/Programme Management
Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time
Location: Bristol, UK
Reporting To: Paul Forrester-Page
Description
We’re building the UK's next generation engineering powerhouse, providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
We specialise in turning advances in sensing, AI, and communications into operational capability for the edge, where connectivity may be degraded or denied. Our work focuses on accelerating the deployment of technology, improving decision-making for frontline teams, and protecting people and critical assets in demanding environments.
Headquartered in Bristol, Rowden employs around 200 people and operates over 20,000 square feet of engineering and manufacturing facilities. We have a growing international footprint and are one of Europe’s fastest-growing engineering businesses.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced, delivery-focused Project/Programme Manager to play a pivotal role in the leadership, delivery, and governance of a complex systems integration programme. This role requires an individual who is highly self-directed, exceptionally proactive, and comfortable operating at pace in a dynamic and complex stakeholder environment.
This role is for a delivery-focused project/programme leader who thrives in complexity and ambiguity. This role is not for someone who requires tightly defined tasks or close direction to operate effectively.
You’ll be joining a high-impact team working with passionate colleagues to deliver a step change in capability for our customer. The role offers the chance to see the direct impact of your work, collaborating closely with end users to solve real problems.
Candidates must be eligible for SC clearance.
More information about security clearance is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels
Salary
For senior roles, compensation is tailored to the scope of the role and the specific experience a candidate brings. Because that can vary significantly, we do not always publish a fixed salary band. We will, however, discuss compensation openly at the first stage of the process and can share an indicative range before either side invests significant time.
Key Areas of Responsibility
- Own the day-to-day delivery of a complex systems integration programme, ensuring progress against agreed milestones, budgets, and outcomes. This is not a helicopter role, you'll be getting stuck in with your team to ensure delivery is successful.
- Own contract scope and manage the commercial landscape across the programme. Your team will look to you to ensure we are operating within the commercial boundaries whilst maximising delivery impact.
- Translate high-level programme outcomes into actionable delivery plans, workstreams, and outputs whilst identifying and communicating both internal and external dependencies.
- Drive alignment across business, engineering, and third-party delivery teams with differing priorities and perspectives, managing interdependencies.
- Anticipate and identify delivery risks and issues early, proactively shaping mitigation strategies rather than reacting late.
- Establish and run effective programme governance, including steering forums, status reporting, RAID management, and decision tracking.
- Produce clear, concise, and decision-oriented reporting for senior stakeholders and sponsors.
- Maintain strong financial and delivery discipline, ensuring scope, cost, and timelines are actively controlled.
- Organise and mobilise busy senior stakeholders, ensuring the right conversations happen at the right time.
- Escalate issues, concerns and risks to the appropriate level at the right time. This includes knowing when to ask for direction and guidance.
- Act as a trusted delivery partner to sponsors, providing clear recommendations and honest assessments of progress and risk.
- Bring structure to ambiguity and create clarity where requirements, ownership, or sequencing are not yet fully defined.
- Push momentum, challenge inertia, and keep delivery moving forward in complex environments.
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Where You’ll Work
While this role will be based predominantly in Bristol, there will be an expectation to travel to Customer sites and other partners within the UK as required. This could be up to a couple of times a week. There may also be a requirement for infrequent overseas travel as part of the programme.
Key Skills, Experience and Behaviours
Core Experience
- You’ll have significant experience delivering complex technology or systems integration projects or programmes preferably within Defence / NS.
- You’ll have demonstrable programme management capability, beyond single-stream project delivery with an expectation of leading multi-year, multi-million pound projects / programmes.
- You’ll have experience operating within formal governance frameworks while still enabling pace and pragmatism.
- A proven track record of coordinating across multiple stakeholders, teams, and vendors.
- Proven experience of leading multi-disciplined technical teams including systems engineers, software engineers, infrastructure engineers alongside safety and security experts.
- You may have initiated, designed, governed and led:
- Large-scale, complex systems design and integrations or digital platform transformations
- Data, cloud, or infrastructure modernisation or delivery projects/programmes
- Technology integration or business transformation initiatives in a complex stakeholder environment
- Projects / programmes in multi-vendor or outsourced procurement / delivery environments
- Complex multi-year / multi-million-pound projects / programmes within Defence or other similar government led organisations.
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Who You Might Be
- You’ll be comfortable in environments where requirements evolve and adapt. Bringing your experts together to make informed decisions should be your natural MO.
- You are highly organised with strong attention to detail, without losing sight of the bigger picture.
- You’re an exceptional communicator and you can distill complexity into clear, actionable messages.
- You have confidence to engage and influence your stakeholders with a focus on building and maintaining strong, strategic relationships.
- While you thrive as a member of a team, you do need to be comfortable operating autonomously and taking ownership of delivery. To do this, you’ll be a strong problem-solver, who anticipates issues rather than escalates when it’s too late.
We’ve outlined what an ideal candidate looks like, but we don’t expect you to meet every requirement. If this role excites you and you bring most of the experience we’re looking for, we’d still encourage you to apply.
Working at Rowden
We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!
We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.
Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.
Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!
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