Commercial Manager

Job title: Bid Finance Manager / Commercial Manager

Location: Based at any Thales site in the UK, with travel to UK sites depending on business needs (Crawley / Cheadle / Templecombe / Reading / Glasgow / Belfast) - hybrid working arrangement – 3 days per week on site.

Are you an ambitious professional with a passion for delivering robust and commercial solutions?

Are you looking to help shape and influence the future prospects of our business?

Are you seeking a role that gives you a wide breadth and profile of exposure and excellent future career possibilities in a leading global organisation?

What the role has to offer:

• Help shape and impact business opportunities and projects
• Visibility across the whole of Thales on the service we provide
• Excellent career development opportunities

Core Benefits:

On offer is a competitive salary and benefits package, which includes;

• Performance-related bonus
• Half day every Friday, usually finishing around 13:00pm
• 28 days annual leave (plus bank holidays) plus opportunity to buy up to 40 hours/year (pro rata)
• 24 hours volunteering paid for
• Private healthcare (grade dependent)
• Pension scheme
• Life cover
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program and access to mental wellbeing app
• Employee discount shopping schemes on major brands and retailers
• Gym membership discounts

Key responsibilities:

As Bid Finance Manager, you will be part of the Thales Bid Finance Team, delivering cost engineering and turning estimates into prices for the Thales UK businesses. This is a unique, dynamic role and you will bring your experience to explore, support and influence prospects, working with other bid team members and Subject Matter Experts to help shape a business winning costed approach with the aim of continually improving the value of the output as it is used in our Project and Bid validation and governance.

As part of the Bid Finance team supporting the estimate collation, management and cost to price modelling of a range of business opportunities, you will use and develop your commercial awareness and stakeholder management to deliver these high quality, winning proposals.

You will work with capture, bid and projects / programmes teams as they define their approach, supporting the teams in generating robust and defendable costed solutions that deliver through the various phases of the development, manufacturing and support life cycles.

As our team and work is spread across a number of UK sites, the successful candidate can be based near any of the locations Thales has in the UK. However, the team ethos is to ‘be where our work needs us to be’ and so as such, short periods working at other Thales locations may be required, as needed, throughout the year (approx. 25%+).

About you:

You will have a degree in a relevant discipline or some equivalent experience in bids, projects, engineering or finance together with the following:-

• Proven experience and understanding of finance and performance metrics
• Business acumen, demonstrated by commercial and financial awareness
• An effective communicator, able to articulate ideas and deliver information clearly and persuasively
• Skilled in Microsoft Office Suite, especially Excel
• Ability to work in multi-stakeholder environment and create clear and achievable goals
• Excellent organisation skills, capable of delivering to agreed timescales in a pressurised bidding environment, capable of appropriate attention to detail

Security Clearance statement:

Due to the nature of the work that we do at Thales, many of our roles are subject to security restrictions. This role requires Security Clearance (SC). It would be advantageous if currently held, however, if not currently held, it is a requirement that the successful applicant undergo, achieve, and maintain SC Clearance prior to commencing employment. Please visit the UKSV website for further guidance.

To be eligible for full SC, you generally need to have resided in the UK for the last 5 years. In some circumstances, a minimum of 3 years’ residence in the UK over the last 5 years may be accepted, with additional overseas checks.