Head of Protection Solutions

About The Role

Balfour Beatty are currently looking for a Head of Protection Solutions to join their Power T&D Division in Newcastle.

Provide strategic leadership for P&C project design & engineering delivery teams and protection solutions, ensuring talent development, client engagement and innovation aligned to business needs and future pipeline.

• Oversee and provide strategic direction for the development of Type Registered protection solutions.
• Support business and design department growth via training and development programmes with a focus on critical roles such as lead engineers, client appointed approval roles and settings verification.
• Drive continuous improvement across engineering processes, systems and tools.
• Ensure client satisfaction, technical assurance and consistent delivery across design delivery and protection solutions teams.
• Ownership of the protection settings function ensuring consistency on outputs and long term resource planning.

• Support professional development, succession planning and competency growth across the Substations P&C Design & Engineering and Protection Solutions teams.
• Champion a culture of shared learning, collaboration and technical excellence.
• Identify opportunities to improve productivity, quality and capability and ensure best practice is adopted and embedded across teams and project delivery.
• Lead development decisions in collaboration with the Head of Design, Protection Development Lead, and Design Discipline Lead (Substations P&C).
• Assess and prioritise new and updated protection solutions based on business pipeline, technical feasibility, cost effectiveness and delivery timescales.
• Ensure solutions are fully governed, assured and ready for deployment into live projects.
• Engage proactively with key clients to assess the impact of policy, standard and specification changes on existing protection solutions.
• Act as the primary point of contact for protection solution discussions, ensuring expectations are managed effectively.
• Maintain strong client and key stakeholder (internal and external) relationships, ensuring high levels of satisfaction and technical confidence.
• Provide senior technical guidance and leadership within protection setting with accountability for the delivery, quality and governance of protection settings.
• Actively promote and demonstrate Group values and behaviours through day-to-day work.

• Degree or equivalent in Civil, Electrical or Power Engineering disciplines.
• Previously held relevant client appointed roles such as P&C CDAE and Settings Verification.
• Ideally a corporate member of, or working towards corporate membership of, an Engineering Institution (e.g. ICE, IEEE, IMechE).
• Strong technical expertise in protection schemes, relay settings, IEC 61850, and transmission/distribution standards.
• Strong client facing skills with the ability to influence, negotiate and manage expectations.
• Possess excellent interpersonal and communication skills, being able to relate to people at all levels in an organisation and to establish and maintain respect both professionally and personally.

Day in, day out, our teams deliver some of the UK’s most ambitious, exciting and meaningful projects; developing, building and maintaining the vital infrastructure that supports national economies and strengthens communities.

• Smart working, giving you more flexibility such as staggered start and finish times, with up to 40% remote working, where roles allow.
• 25 days paid annual leave (pro rata)
• Family friendly policies which include 28 weeks full pay for maternity/adoption leave and four weeks full pay for paternity/partners leave
• Pension, share incentive plan, volunteering leave, recognition schemes and much more…

Balfour Beatty’s Power Transmission & Distribution teams work with regional, national and international electricity network owners and operators to provide technical engineering solutions across the full spectrum of the electricity grid, including overhead lines, cabling, substations and distribution networks. From scoping and feasibility, to design, construction and…