Principal Project Manager

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Job Description

A Principal Project Manager at Heathrow, will provide senior leadership across a portfolio of complex infrastructure projects at Heathrow. The role is accountable for leading and developing Project Managers, providing first-line assurance, and acting as the escalation point to ensure delivery remains aligned to Heathrow's strategic, commercial, and operational priorities.

Operating in a highly regulated, live airport environment, the role balances safety, performance, cost, risk, and benefits while maintaining strong stakeholder relationships and driving high-performing supply chain outcomes. The Principal Project Manager plays a critical role in building delivery capability, protecting operational resilience, and ensuring projects deliver long-term value. You will communicate with confidence across all levels of the organisation, navigating competing priorities and influencing decisions that protect operational performance and maximise project value.

Responsibilities

• Building capability by leading and developing Project Managers and technical specialists, deploying resources effectively and promoting a culture of safe, accountable, and inclusive delivery.
• Acting as the single point of leadership for your portfolio, defining clear scope, securing appropriate resourcing, and maintaining control of cost, time, risk, and benefits across the project lifecycle.
• Building strong internal and external relationships to strengthen Heathrow's delivery capability and ensure programme performance meets commercial and operational expectations.
• Providing first-line assurance across project documentation, challenging proposals to ensure plans are robust, portfolio-aligned, and deliver agreed outcomes safely, efficiently, and to the required quality.
• Leading and holding accountability for supply chain performance, enabling teams to operate effectively, work efficiently, and achieve consistently high-performing delivery.
• Leading and taking accountability for team health, safety, and wellbeing, and ensuring Construction Design and Management Regulations (CDM) duties are met across all activities.

Qualifications

• Highly effective communicator, with strong interpersonal, coordination, and stakeholder management skills, able to work effectively across multicultural and multidisciplinary teams.
• Comfortable working across all levels of the organisation, highly effective in conflict resolution, building relationships with key stakeholders. Has a clear awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses, and can operate across a diverse range of personalities.
• Proven experience in autonomously leading, managing and developing diverse teams on large Infrastructure projects or programmes.
• Good understanding of how to balance operational, commercial, and strategic priorities to ensure programmes deliver measurable value, optimise cost efficiency, and support long term business performance.
• Experienced practitioner of contracts (ideally NEC) and supply chain performance management, including developing proposals for pricing, setting up and executing contracts, undertaking tenders, and administrating in delivery including change.
• Experienced practitioner in all aspects of project controls, including developing project forecasts and understanding earned value, programme reliability, projected outturn costs etc.
• Experienced practitioner in Project and Business risk management, including identification, assessment and development of mitigation strategies. Demonstrable experience of how this has been actively applied to support project success.

Ideally you will have

• Degree qualification in an appropriate discipline, or equivalent academic achievement.
• Working towards APM Chartered Project Professional (CPP), Achieved APM PMQ or equivalent.
• Achieved NEC accreditation.

About Us

There's something so special about working at the world's most iconic airport. Its sights. Its sounds. Its constant air of excitement. Heathrow is an amazing backdrop to a career filled with unique opportunities.

Every day, you'll discover a world full of fresh possibilities and end the day buzzing with stories to tell, as you encounter people from all cultures, nationalities and experiences. A world full of pride for what we do and no end of exciting career prospects to explore.

It brings out the best in all of us. And inspires everyone to deliver on our ambitious plans. Together, we're working to welcome millions more passengers while ensuring aviation can continue to be a force for good by leading global efforts in sustainability.

Join us on that journey and we'll help you achieve your ambitions too. Supporting you to learn, encouraging you to be yourself, backing you to achieve more than you might ever have imagined. Because there's no place like Heathrow.

Our rewards

We offer competitive salaries and excellent benefits that will support you now and in the future. As well as performance-based annual bonuses and our longer-term Share in Success Bonus plans, we also offer generous annual leave allowances and market-leading pensions. With family friendly policies, access to private health insurance and a wide range of wellbeing tools, we'll support you to be at your best inside and outside work. And of course, we'll provide varied learning and development opportunities too. Here you'll find everything you need for a fulfilling career journey that can take you in exciting directions.

Working Location

Our Hybrid working approach offers the opportunity for colleagues in some roles to work from home for an average of two days a week, providing the flexibility to work in an agile way whilst ensuring we deliver for the operational needs of Heathrow. Working arrangements vary from team to team and will be confirmed during the recruitment process. You'll need to be based in the UK and within a commutable distance to Heathrow.

Sustainable Travel to work

Heathrow's Sustainable Travel Guide sets out easy and sustainable travel options that everyone can access.

Equal Opportunities

As an equal opportunities employer, we encourage applications from all. We believe that diverse talent makes us stronger - not least because we welcome passengers from all corners of the globe, every single day. Heathrow is an accessible place to work. With five diversity networks, we champion inclusivity and celebrate individuality.

About the Team

Together, we're working to welcome millions more passengers, while ensuring aviation can continue to be a force for good by leading global efforts in sustainability. At Heathrow, you can be part of this - providing solutions that make every journey better for millions each year. That means ensuring we meet the changing needs of the passengers, colleagues and partners who use our airport to work, travel, trade, shop, eat, explore and connect. Our Solutions team covers project management, process improvement, business change, technology, cyber defence, masterplanning, infrastructure and procurement. It brings together people with the skills to deliver prestigious and often large-scale projects, from transforming terminals to making big reductions in our carbon emissions.

Every day will test your skills and give you the opportunity to make your mark. You might be working with the technology and data that power our city within a city, driving vital commercial agreements with everyone from retailers to airlines, or improving the unique infrastructure that includes everything from 200 buildings to 250 HV substations. It's a collaborative environment, where you can rely on the support of the experts around you as you take on projects you'll both take pride in and feel passionate about.