PM Operational Lead

Job Description

Job title: PM Operational Lead

Location: Warton – Minimum 4 days per week onsite with potential travel within the UK and flexible working

Salary: £63,310+ dependant on experience

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead the Project Management Function: Directly manage, mentor, and grow the project management team, building a high-performance culture rooted in ownership, collaboration, and accountability.
• Integrate Cross-Functional Activities: Oversee programme-wide integration across Engineering and Functional teams ensuring that your project managers are integrated into all workstreams with clarity of purpose and shared milestones.
• Drive Strategic Alignment: Align project activities with overall programme goals, providing guidance and decision-making support to your team and cross-discipline leaders.
• Govern Programme Delivery: Maintain effective governance routines, including programme reviews, performance tracking, and decision-making forums that support on-time and on-budget delivery.
• Own Configuration Control: Lead your team in maintaining strict configuration and change control across project artefacts, enabling informed and agile decision-making.
• Mitigate Risk Proactively: Identify risks across teams and work packages, alongside developing resolution plans that protect the integrity of the programme.
• Control Programme Configuration: Maintain configuration control of programme artefacts, such as schedules, baselines, change logs, and risk registers, adapting as needed for evolving requirements.
• Champion Continuous Improvement: Introduce and embed programme management best practices and digital toolsets, driving efficiency and excellence across the delivery ecosystem

Your skills and experiences:

Essential:

• A proven background in programme or project integration and programme controls.
• Strong working knowledge of programme management tools such as Microsoft Project, Jira, and digital collaboration platforms.
• Demonstrable experience facilitating programme reviews, driving inter-departmental collaboration, and managing dependencies.

Desirable:

• Experience managing complex engineering or aerospace programmes, ideally with exposure to the development phase.
• Recognised qualification in programme/project management (e.g., APM PMQ, MSP, PRINCE2, or PMI PMP)

Benefits

As well as a competitive pension scheme, BAE Systems also offers employee share plans, an extensive range of flexible discounted health, wellbeing and lifestyle benefits, including a green car scheme, private health plans and shopping discounts – you may also be eligible for an annual incentive.

The Dreadnought Integration project management Team

As a PM Operational Lead, you will lead and develop the Dreadnought Integration project management team, aligning them around a shared vision of delivery excellence. Reporting directly to senior leadership, you will act as the strategic force behind the integration of cross-functional activities, ensuring coordination across engineering, manufacturing, planning, commercial, and flight operations. Your work will underpin the programme’s success and shape the future of aerospace technology.

You will be the connective tissue across the organisation—aligning programme objectives, eliminating silos, and orchestrating the smooth delivery of major milestones. While, at the same time, leading the project management professionals, enabling them to deliver with precision and impact. You will shape and mature our delivery frameworks, coach emerging leaders, and ensure consistent project performance that delivers on time, on budget, and to scope.

Why BAE Systems?

This is a place where you’ll be able to make a real difference. You’ll be part of an inclusive culture that values diversity of thought, rewards integrity, and merit, and where you’ll be empowered to fulfil your potential. We welcome people from all backgrounds and want to make sure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible. If you have a disability or health condition (for example dyslexia, autism, an anxiety disorder etc.) that may affect your performance in certain assessment types, please speak to your recruiter about potential reasonable adjustments.

Please be aware that many roles at BAE Systems are subject to both security and export control restrictions. These restrictions mean that factors such as your nationality, any nationalities you may have previously held, and your place of birth can restrict the roles you are eligible to perform within the organisation. All applicants must as a minimum achieve Baseline Personnel Security Standard. Many roles also require higher levels of National Security Vetting where applicants must typically have 5 to 10 years of continuous residency in the UK depending on the vetting level required for the role, to allow for meaningful security vetting checks.

Closing Date: 6th February 2026

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.

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