Head of Engineering of Facilities and Infrastructure

York, Leeds or Manchester

Grade: Executive

About Northern:

At Northern, we play a vital role across the North by providing a reliable and friendly train service that connects hundreds of thousands of people to work, leisure, education and more. Our customers trust us with over 2,500 services every weekday, and we travel to almost 550 destinations.

Our vision is about more than just train travel. It’s about setting a new standard for customer experiences, and that means building a different kind of workplace: one that is inclusive, values individuality, and celebrates differences; somewhere we can work harmoniously together, have fun, and get stuck into making our customers’ lives easier; a place that goes out of its way to create incredible opportunities for everyone to grow and be the best we can be, every single day.

So, if you’re a highly skilled engineering manager, a great people-person, smart, forward-thinking, enthusiastic, and full of fresh ideas, you could play your part in making it happen.

About the role:

We are actively recruiting an inspirational and intelligent Head of Engineering Facilities and Infrastructure to report to our Engineering Director, Jack Commandeur. As a key member of the Engineering Senior Leadership team, supporting other SLT members and adopting a cabinet responsibility approach. In essence, you will ‘own’ Engineering’s external relationship with Network Rail and other key external partners, to ensure that our infrastructure is safe and compliant and that our agenda is prioritised and delivered.

You will manage and lead the programme of change within Northern’s Engineering function, ensuring cultural change and modernisation of practices are delivered.

You will manage and lead both internal and external stakeholders across a diverse programme of activity, including managing resistance to change within a complex organisation and navigating governance processes to ensure progress.

Your primary focus will be to work with our Production and Rolling Stock Strategy Teams, using a planning horizon of up to 20 years, to define Engineering’s facilities and infrastructure asset strategy, ensuring in turn that it delivers the optimum workplace to facilitate delivery of our rolling stock strategy.

Your responsibilities:

About you:

• The ideal candidate will be a strong business leader with a proven track record in Engineering Facilities and Infrastructure, who can demonstrate success in nurturing and leading high-performing teams. You should also be a strategic thinker who is able to translate this locally into tactical plans and to identify opportunities for change in all areas of the business.

You should also be able to demonstrate the following:

• Proven breadth of experience in delivering significant infrastructure projects within a complex, safety critical organisation with reliance on third party suppliers for their delivery.
• Strategic thinking with the ability to translate the overarching strategy into business cases and operational deliverables.
• Excellent internal and external stakeholder management skills.
• Strong communication skills, which allow you to communicate effectively with all levels within the organisation and with external stakeholders.
• Recognition as a strong leader with the ability to establish and maintain. strong relationships and influence others to move towards a common vision or goal.
• Proven experience and understanding of finance and of managing large budgets.
• Must have a good knowledge and understanding of railway operations (or other safety critical industries), project management, engineering production processes and depot access agreements, preferably gained from senior depot management positions.
• Experience gained in a rail environment would be benefit.

In return, you’ll discover brilliant opportunities to grow and progress within Northern, not to mention amazing perks and benefits like free or discounted travel, employee assistance, generous policies, regular pay reviews and a great pension.

We look forward to receiving your application.

NB. Northern Trains is an equal opportunities employer, strongly committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

We encourage and welcome applications from candidates from all backgrounds.

Northern holds a disability-confident status, reflecting our commitment to creating a truly inclusive culture in the workplace.