Cambridge Spark on cord

Cambridge Spark

Bid Manager

External position
Remote in UK
Hiring internally for Cambridge Spark?
EdTech · E-Learning
Digital Skills for Workforce Transformation
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
6 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Business Development Manager
Experience level: Senior, Lead
Core skills considered: Business development, Project Management, Stakeholder Management
Other skills considered: Client relations, Process management

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Remote
Work from: Within United Kingdom
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're looking for an experienced Bid Manager to lead our bidding end to end - public sector and apprenticeship tenders, frameworks and DPS call-offs, and commercial proposals to some of the largest organisations in the country. You'll draft and prepare the responses, working with the Sales Enablement Director on approach and positioning before drafting starts, and on review before anything goes out.

Much of the job is project management, with a bid coordinator reporting to you: setting the bid plan and the dates contributors who don't report to you work to, and managing senior stakeholders on both sides - buyers and their evaluators, and our own directors through the approval gates.

The rest is building what we bid with - a response library that gets sharper with every submission, and AI workflows for scoping, drafting and review that live in our systems as method rather than in one person's habits. That's year-one work, and you'll shape it.

You'll also own how the function is resourced against what's coming: what each opportunity will take, what we can carry at once, and what we need in order to bid well rather than thinly. We're building the function now, so you'll have real influence over how it works and over how we present ourselves to the organisations we most want to win.


What you'll do

  • Own our most complex bids end to end - major tenders and commercial proposals where there's no template to work from - from first sight of the brief through submission and presentation to outcome review, with the account executive on their own accounts.
  • Write or rework the sections that decide the score, and build the case from scratch where there's no question set, reading the brief for what the buyer is really purchasing.
  • Own the standard our written and designed material is held to: review what the coordinator and others in the team produce, and produce the bespoke material yourself.
  • Make the bid/no-bid recommendation, agree approach and positioning with the Director before drafting starts, and own the quality review before final sign-off.
  • Set the bid plan and the dates contributors across Delivery, Curriculum, Quality, Engineering, Finance and Legal work to, with the coordinator running the tracking, and escalate slippage early rather than absorbing it.
  • Manage senior stakeholders on both sides: clarification questions and buyer contact through the process, directors and the executive team internally.
  • Own the presentation stage - who attends, the brief and the rehearsal - so the room can carry the argument the document made.
  • Lead and develop the bid coordinator, and be accountable for the operational base they run: portals, framework and DPS registrations and renewals, accreditation evidence and submission discipline.
  • Own capacity planning and agree resourcing with the Director - what each opportunity takes, what we can carry at once, and what we need to bid well rather than thinly.
  • Own the standard our response library is held to, and commission and ratify content from named owners across the business.
  • Own the commercial and compliance material bids depend on - pricing, security, social value and intellectual property - working with the functions that supply it.
  • Run loss debriefs and outcome reviews, and report monthly on submissions, win value, effort and outcome.
  • Build the process, toolstack and AI workflows the function runs on, as reusable method held in our systems rather than in one person's habits.

Requirements

  • A track record of winning complex, high-value B2B bids - both structured tenders and proposals written from scratch. We'll ask you to talk through a specific win and a specific loss, and what you took from each.
  • Demonstrable bid project management: several live bids at once, to deadline, coordinating contributors you have no line authority over.
  • Credible with senior people on both sides - able to hold a director to a date, form a view on what a buyer really wants and defend it, and stand in front of an evaluation panel.
  • Sets the standard for client-ready designed material, and produces it themselves for bespoke proposals where no template exists.
  • Working knowledge of UK public sector procurement - ITTs, frameworks, DPS and portals.
  • Uses AI as a working method rather than an occasional shortcut, with the discipline to check everything that comes out of it.

Desirable

  • Experience leading or developing bid staff, and of building process and governance where it didn't previously exist.
  • Able to position a response against named competitors - understanding what the alternative looks like to that buyer, not just describing what we do.
  • Experience in learning, skills, apprenticeships, professional services or technology sold into large enterprises.
  • Experience of capacity planning across a bid pipeline.
  • APMP certification, or experience of bid tooling (Loopio, Bid Hive, AutogenAI) or the equivalent built from general-purpose tools.
Bid Manager at Cambridge Spark
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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