Bid Manager

The Challenge:

We are seeking a Bid Manager to work on our complex opportunities with our technical and market-facing business development leads. This role gives you the opportunity to share your end-to-end bid management skills and use them to work alongside business development colleagues. Together you will develop compelling value propositions, capture best-practice, scope opportunities and new, innovative concepts and solutions.

You will be responsible for managing opportunities from qualification to contract award. This includes the introduction and implementation of all necessary capture and bid procedures, governance, and processes. You will have a solid foundation in the methodology of bidding best-practice, but we also need someone who has the skills, behaviours, and confidence to take an agile and flexible approach that still delivers excellent proposals and a customer-focused service.

This is a highly networked role that requires an ability to work under pressure and to agreed deadlines. It requires strong people management and commercial skills. Experience of working on grant funding / CR&D opportunities is desirable, but not essential.

Key Responsibilities:

Capture and Bid Management:

• Manage virtual and in-person bid teams and inputs from stakeholders, typically involving contributions from opportunity leads, technical specialists, partners, finance, commercial, legal and delivery

• Be responsible for working on opportunities with the business development leads to deliver the end-to-end bid management process (Capture through to Contract Sign)

• Developing, resourcing and managing the bid programme for your bids which includes capture planning, bid scoping, shredding, and storyboarding

• Planning and monitoring progress against plan, addressing issues as they arise (with the support from the opportunity owner, peers and the Head of Work Winning Services)

• Risk tracking and management throughout the bid

• Build and manage bid budgets, including translation to funder formats

• Ensuring all project delivery costs are inputted correctly, signed-off and comply with approval requirements

• Setting up and managing formal capture and bid reviews (bid approval, red review, financial / ops review, approval to submit)

• Ensuring bid deliverables are to the appropriate quality, on schedule, on budget and in accordance with the client requirements

• Getting and disseminating customer feedback on bids won and lost

• Instigating / facilitating lessons learned sessions to continuously improve the quality of bidding

Reporting and Governance:

• Report progress of the bid(s) to various stakeholders in the business at regular intervals

• Managing the handover from bid to delivery (Service Delivery Manager or Project Manager)

Stakeholder Management:

• Build and maintain strong relationships with clients, SMEs, funding agencies, and consortium partners

• Represent the organisation at client meetings, industry events, conferences, and workshops

• Lead or support external partners to produce high-quality bid contributions and align approaches

• Promote positive relationships and knowledge sharing across the wider business

Skills & Experience Required:

• Proven experience leading and delivering successful bids using recognised industry best practice

• Strong understanding of the full bid lifecycle — from opportunity identification and qualification through to project handover and delivery

• Strategic thinker with an agile, adaptable approach suited to a fast-paced R&D and innovation environment

• Creative and persuasive, able to develop compelling solutions and inspire teams around new concepts and services

• Politically astute with the awareness and interpersonal skills to navigate complex stakeholder situations

• Excellent communicator, confident engaging with a wide range of stakeholders including SMEs, academics, partners, and funding bodies

• Strong commercial acumen, financial awareness, and risk management capability

• Experienced in managing multi-workstream opportunities with attention to quality and compliance

• Familiar with governance frameworks and internal approval processes, ensuring adherence to bidding best practice

• Collaborative and supportive team player who helps build capability and consistency across bid teams

• Desirable: APMP Foundation (or equivalent)

About us & how we work: 

The Satellite Applications Catapult is one the UK’s nine Catapult innovation and technology centres, focused on the space sector. Our purpose is to grow the UK economy by supporting our best companies to accelerate the invention and adoption of space data and technology.

The UK’s Industrial Strategy sets an objective of building a globally competitive UK space sector built on exports, with a target of increasing the number of UK space companies generating more than £10 million in revenue.

We share in that objective and help UK businesses innovate, grow, and scale. We work with companies from start-up to scale-up, to drive innovation and support their growth, unlocking new opportunities and connect them with customers, investors, and international markets. By bringing together businesses, researchers and universities, government, and end-users, we accelerate growth across the UK space ecosystem. We focus our work in our three missions – Autonomous & Connected Earth, Sustainable Earth, and Beyond Earth. These align with government priority capabilities in satellite communications, autonomy, PNT, earth observation, and ISAM (in-orbit servicing, logistics, assembly and manufacturing), and represent areas of strength and opportunity in the UK space sector.

We strive to create a high trust, high performance and inclusive environment that enables team members to bring their whole selves to work.  This helps to create the foundations of an innovation culture. Our shared values are critical to this: 

• We care - for our people, our partners, and our planet

• We connect - and engage with people and ideas

• We learn - and grow, as people and as an industry

Underpinning this is our belief in great teams.  Our combined efforts will always deliver outcomes beyond that of any individual, providing we are honest through debate, experiment and reflect, and create shared resolutions in support of our purpose. Live these values, work to our principles, take ownership to deliver, and we are certain you will thrive with us. 

This job description set outs the skills and experience we think are needed to be able to perform in this job.  If you believe you can deliver in this role then we want to hear from you.

We offer a hybrid policy which is designed around collaboration, one 'anchor' day per week working with your direct team and another flexible day per week to be spent collaborating or working with other colleagues.

Important notice for applicants: We use tools to detect plagiarism and the use of AI or chatbots for applicant answers. If plagiarism, AI use (such as ChatGPT) or similar software are found to have been used in your application you will not be considered for this or future roles within the Satellite Applications Catapult.

At Satellite Applications Catapult, we're committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workforce. We welcome candidates from all corners of the globe, but due to legal and logistical considerations, we want to be transparent about the potential visa-related challenges that could arise. Our ability to offer sponsorship will depend on the level of interest for our roles and salary level.

If you need any additional support during the application process, please do reach out and connect. We also invite you to share feedback via Applied.

Please note that we offer study support (at our discretion) and on the job training will be provided.