Manager, Supply Chain & Operations, Infrastructure

Manager, Supply Chain and Operations, Infrastructure 

Manchester, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow

The UK government’s “UK Infrastructure: A 10 Year Strategy” sets out a long-term, cross-sector plan to drive economic growth, deliver net zero, and improve public services. With a £725 billion commitment, the strategy prioritises stability, private investment, and robust delivery across transport, energy, digital, water, housing, and social infrastructure, giving confidence and direction across the entire supply chain. 

However, infrastructure supply chain and operations are facing unprecedented global uncertainty, risk and volatility.  

Sustainable infrastructure will play a critical role in delivering this strategy and in overcoming these challenges. Building a career in this sector offers diverse opportunities on some of the UK’s most transformational and iconic projects. 

The opportunity 
Take your career to the next level and join a high performing and inclusive team, working collaboratively with some of the largest infrastructure projects in the world as they seek to deliver, operate and transform. Specifically, our teams focus on the following core areas: 

• The initiation and successful delivery of transformation programmes, tackling our clients’ most pressing and complex initiatives  

• Sustainable infrastructure to support the government’s green infrastructure plan and ambition to deliver net zero to the UK 

• The involvement in early stage, large scale infrastructure project development activities, as well as ongoing support, to drive more successful infrastructure project delivery 

We are focused on growing our supply chain capability in the infrastructure market across a wide range of clients within a variety of sectors, including transport, energy, defence, utilities, digital and social infrastructure. 

We value curious thinkers who have the courage to lead, great communicators who do not take themselves too seriously, flexible collaborators who build relationships based on doing the right thing, and innovative problem-solvers who use their experience to ultimately find a better way.  

Your Key Responsibilities 
Our clients place considerable trust in us and our advice, and people who are passionate about going above and beyond to improve our working world, unifies us as a team. This is crucial in enabling us to consistently deliver or exceed on our commitments. 

As a Manager, you’ll balance internal and external responsibilities across client delivery, business development, operational excellence and people development. 

• Build, maintain and strengthen client relationships, acting as a trusted advisor in at least one of: supply chain, operations, sustainability within the infrastructure sector 

• Lead one or more workstreams end-to-end, owning the workplan, dependencies, RAID, and delivery of outcomes within your remit 

• Manage day-to-day delivery with the client and EY team, coordinating cross-functional inputs (often across different parts of EY) to ensure pace and alignment 

• Shape and quality assure client-ready outputs (reports, documents, presentations), synthesising analysis into clear insights and practical recommendations 

• Own quality and delivery excellence for your workstream(s), proactively identifying risks and taking corrective action to exceed client expectations 

• Coach and develop junior team members, providing on-the-job guidance, feedback and oversight to build capability and confidence 

• Play an active role in business development, coordinating proposal inputs, shaping approach and storyline, and supporting tender responses 

• Contribute to internal practice development, building infrastructure-relevant capability and collateral (with particular focus in supply chain and operations) 

• Support EY’s market positioning in UK infrastructure, by contributing to points of view, credentials, and go-to-market activities aligned to priority accounts and sectors 

Your experience 

An understanding of the UK infrastructure sector is important to this role, whether from experience working in industry, government or a management consultancy environment. Knowledge of one or more of the following sectors is preferred: transport, energy, defence, utilities, digital and social infrastructure.  

Managers are expected to have demonstrable experience in at least one of the areas below, and working knowledge across multiple others, including applying this experience in a client delivery context (e.g., leading workstreams, shaping outputs, managing stakeholders): 

• Leading the design and/or implementation of operating models, delivery models and transformations in infrastructure or a related sector 

• Owning workstream-level delivery of commercial, procurement and supply chain strategies (from analysis through to recommendations and implementation planning) 

• Hands-on contracts experience, including managing contract development and change, and applying knowledge of common forms (e.g., NEC, FIDIC, JCT) 

• Delivering strategic sourcing / category management activity and supply chain mapping, translating insights into practical interventions 

• Supporting improvements to operations and asset management for major assets and networks 

• Contributing to policy development and stakeholder engagement in infrastructure contexts 

• Developing HMT Green Book-aligned business cases, including options, benefits, costs, deliverability and value for money considerations 

• Designing and delivering end-to-end solutions that enable sustainable change, including net zero / net negative transitions 

• Programme and project management delivery, including governance, plans, RAID and benefits tracking across traditional and agile environments 

Qualifications 
Our Managers have excellent verbal and written communication skills and can engage confidently with senior stakeholders. They are proactive, energetic self-starters who bring structure, pace and judgement to delivery. They are comfortable leading teams, managing competing priorities, and producing high‑quality outputs to challenging deadlines. Specific qualifications you must have are: 

• Experience within the infrastructure or related sector 

• The ability to write to a high standard, being fluent/native in English (additional major languages desirable) 

• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to adapt style and approach to suit different contexts and environments 

• Demonstrable experience leading workstreams / small teams, including planning work, directing activity and reviewing outputs for quality 

• A willingness to travel and work across the UK and potentially overseas 

What we offer 
EY is committed to being an inclusive employer and we are happy to consider flexible working arrangements. We strive to achieve the right balance for our people, enabling us to deliver excellent client service whilst allowing you to build your career without sacrificing your personal priorities. While our client-facing professionals can be required to travel regularly, and at times be based at client sites, our flexible working arrangements can help you to achieve a lifestyle balance.