Engineering Design Lead

Job Description

Hybrid | Warrington | Competitive Salary + Exceptional Benefits

Ready 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 mission

As 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.

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 get

A 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.