Full job descriptionHybrid | Warrington | Competitive Salary + Exceptional BenefitsReady to shape the future of engineering design across one of the UK’s largest infrastructure programmes? At United Utilities, we’re transforming how we deliver essential services — and we need a design leader who can drive standardisation, digital innovation and high-performance delivery across AMP8 and beyond.
This is your opportunity to take a pivotal role where your leadership will influence every stage of our capital programme, ensuring best-value, regulatory-aligned and digitally enabled design outcomes for millions of customers.
Your missionAs our Engineering Design Lead, you’ll take ownership of the end-to-end design delivery model across the CEC, ensuring commercially viable, standardised and high-quality engineering outputs. You’ll lead the strategic management of our design partners, embed digital engineering capability, and build a unified design management function that supports predictable, efficient and best-value delivery.
You’ll shape the processes, systems and partnerships that underpin our AMP8 design strategy — driving collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement across internal teams and external partners.
You’ll be doing things like*Leading the strategic management and performance of design partners, ensuring alignment to UU’s commercial, technical and regulatory requirements.
*Governing engineering design processes, defining and maintaining workflows, technical checkpoints and assurance standards.
*Driving partner performance management through KPIs, SLAs, delivery metrics, cost-to-serve and quality assurance measures.
*Coordinating collaborative planning across internal engineering teams, design partners and programme units to optimise resource use and enable predictable delivery.
*Ensuring consistent adoption of UU standardised assets and design catalogues, working closely with internal specialists and DDP framework partners.
*Managing interfaces between internal design teams and external partners, ensuring clear roles, responsibilities and integrated workflows from concept to detailed design.
*Leading innovation in digital engineering — including automation, AI-enabled design tools, digital twins and model-based delivery.
*Chairing technical governance forums and partner reviews, representing UU in steering groups and collaborative improvement sessions.
*Identifying and mitigating technical and delivery risks across internal and partner-delivered designs.
*Ensuring best-value design outcomes by embedding operability, maintainability and whole-life considerations.
*Building and developing the new Design Management function to support in-house engineering capability.
*Upskilling internal teams and embedding best-practice processes to support detailed design delivery in AMP8 and AMP9.
*Contributing to commercial strategy and procurement for future design partner frameworks, defining technical scope and digital maturity expectations.
*Driving continuous improvement across design processes, systems and standards, ensuring lessons learned inform future governance.
*Working with DDP framework managers to harmonise design standards and embed standardised assets across programmes.
*Collaborating with senior leaders across Asset Strategy, County teams, Programme Directors and Maintenance Excellence to deliver best-value designs.
What we’re looking for*Chartered status with a relevant professional institution, or equivalent experience with commitment to achieve chartership within 12 months.
*Extensive experience managing third-party design partners within large, complex engineering or infrastructure programmes.
*Strong leadership capability with the ability to influence senior stakeholders across multiple organisations.
*Deep understanding of engineering design processes, technical governance, quality assurance and regulatory requirements.
*Proven experience implementing and optimising digital engineering systems, including BIM, CDE platforms and model-based workflows.
*Demonstrable ability to build collaborative relationships across multidisciplinary and multi-organisational teams.
*Strong commercial awareness, including cost-to-serve management, performance metrics, contractual frameworks and value engineering.
*High resilience and adaptability across multi-project environments with evolving scope and regulatory demands.
*Strong understanding of operational and maintenance considerations to ensure best-value, reliable assets.
*Track record of driving standardisation, innovation and process improvement in engineering design environments.
*Evidence of successful collaborative working to achieve shared organisational objectives.
What you’ll getA competitive package that recognises your expertise, including:
*26–30 days holiday + bank holidays
*Up to 14% employer pension contribution
*£5,000 car allowance
*Up to 20% bonus
*Healthcare, wellbeing benefits, discounts and more
If you’re ready to lead the next generation of engineering design, drive digital transformation and deliver best-value outcomes for customers and the environment, we’d love to welcome your expertise to United Utilities.