Contract Project Manager
Location: Maidenhead (minimum 3 days/week onsite, flexibility as required)
Duration: 6 months
Rate: £700-£800/day (Umbrella)
IR35: Not specified
Clearance: Due to the nature of the role, applicants must hold the sole British nationality and be eligible to obtain full SC Clearance
Overview
This contract role is based at a Cyber Centre of Excellence in Maidenhead, leading the end-to-end delivery of complex, multidisciplinary engineering projects across the full lifecycle (concept through delivery, acceptance, and close-out). You'll drive governance through stage gates and ensure schedule, cost and quality targets are achieved in a structured, regulated environment.
Responsibilities:
- Managing the end-to-end delivery of multidisciplinary engineering projects
- Driving successful outcomes across the full project lifecycle-from concept definition through delivery, acceptance, and close-out
- Providing strong leadership and governance, guiding projects through defined stage gates
- Ensuring projects meet schedule, cost, and quality objectives
- Collaborating closely with technical, commercial, and wider business stakeholders
- Bringing structure, pace, and assurance to the delivery of complex engineering projects
Skillset/experience required:
- Proven experience in project management within an engineering, or technology environment ideally
- An awareness and understanding of engineering principles and lifecycle models
- Experience with structured project management methodologies such as Waterfall, Scrum and Agile
- Excellent stakeholder management, both internal and external, with superb communication skills
- Experience in managing customer relationships, ideally within the Defence Sector
- Strong leadership and team coordination capabilities
- Proficiency in project management tools (e.g., MS Project, Jira)
Desirable:
- Formal certification (e.g., APM PMQ, PRINCE2, AgilePM)
- Defence/aerospace/highly regulated environment experience
- Delivery involving software, firmware and hardware integration
- Systems Engineering V-Lifecycle understanding
- Physical production and/or product through-life support experience
