Project Innovation Manager

Bechtel Corporation•Houston, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

In this role, you will own a portfolio of field technology deployments across multiple Bechtel Energy projects rather than a single initiative. You will plan the scope, schedule, and cost of that portfolio, decide which technologies are ready for a live jobsite and which are not, and carry the ones that succeed from a single successful pilot into a repeatable standard other projects can run without you. You will serve as the senior technical authority for field deployment within the Energy Innovation team: the escalation point when a deployment stalls, the person who negotiates scope and performance with vendors, the owner of the business case and benefits realization, and the coach who develops Field Deployment Engineers and rotational assignees. You will also plan and review the work of others assigned to parts of your initiatives, and interface with other project functions and services to optimize expertise and resources.

Requirements

Requires a bachelor's degree (or international equivalent) and 5-8 years of relevant experience, or 9-12 years of relevant work experience.
Degree in mechanical engineering, mechatronics, robotics, chemical engineering, construction engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, systems engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Ability to work in field construction environments, comply with project safety requirements, and travel to project sites as required.
Demonstrated record of taking a technology through a live field pilot to an adopted, repeatable practice, including at least one deployment the candidate personally owned end to end. This is the primary qualifying factor and separates this role from technology scouting or research experience.
Working command of technology maturity assessment and the discipline to judge readiness honestly, so that field access, craft time, and project money are committed only to technologies that can survive an operating jobsite.
Substantive construction or industrial field experience, sufficient to hold a credible technical conversation with Superintendents, Field Engineering, and craft supervision about sequencing, constructability, and workfront risk.
Vendor and commercial capability: scoping statements of work, defining acceptance and performance criteria, evaluating proposals, and holding suppliers accountable to field results in coordination with Procurement.
Ability to build and defend a business case, including defining benefit measures before a pilot begins, validating the underlying field data, and presenting outcomes and recommendations to project and functional leadership.
Change management and adoption skill: the ability to get a new capability used by crews who did not ask for it, through training, work instructions, early-adopter support, and visible field presence.
Ability to plan, coordinate, and review the work of others, and to mentor junior engineers on pilot planning, field testing, documentation, and stakeholder engagement.

Nice To Haves

Deep experience in one or more of: robotics and autonomous systems, remotely operated construction equipment, drones and reality capture, IoT sensing and telematics, construction analytics, or digital construction workflows, with breadth across the others.
LNG, oil and gas, power, or other large industrial project experience, and familiarity with the field engineering, quality, and ES&H processes such projects run on.
FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate or equivalent, and OSHA 30-Hour Construction. Candidates with drone experience are encouraged to include drone make, model, flight experience, and flight hours at the top of their resume.
Systems integration experience covering site connectivity, data pipelines, and integration of field devices with existing project platforms, together with awareness of the security considerations that connected devices introduce on an operating site.
Proficiency with engineering, geospatial, or analytics tooling such as SolidWorks, ANSYS Workbench, ArcGIS, Autodesk ReCap, AutoCAD, or comparable platforms, and the ability to work with field data directly rather than only through reports.

Responsibilities

Plans the scope, schedule, and cost of field deployment initiatives for a medium-sized project or a particular technology area, and plans, develops, implements, and maintains those initiatives to accelerate the safer, better, faster, and leaner execution of our projects.
Owns a multi-project deployment portfolio across the U.S. Gulf Coast LNG projects, prioritizing initiatives against project pain points, sequencing deployments around construction schedules, and deciding where limited field access and craft attention are spent.
Leads pilot execution end to end, from securing the pilot opportunity with a live project through execution plan, success criteria, field validation, close-out report, and the recommendation on whether to scale, iterate, or stop.
Converts successful pilots into repeatable deployment standards, workflows, checklists, training material, and support models that other Energy projects can adopt without a bespoke effort each time.
Serves as the primary technical escalation point for field deployments, leading root cause analysis on failed or underperforming technology and deciding when to recover, rescope, or terminate a deployment.
Owns the business case and benefits realization for the deployments in the portfolio, defining the productivity, schedule, safety, and cost measures up front, validating the data behind them, and reporting outcomes to project and functional leadership.
Initiates and leads engagements with vendors, consultants, and other third parties, shaping scope, performance expectations, support and sustainment arrangements, and commercial structure in coordination with Procurement, and makes recommendations on the innovation aspects of bid evaluations and awards for approval.
Provides inputs for strategy, planning, estimating of budgets and staff, implementation, procedure management, knowledge management, measurement and reporting, risk management, and continuous improvement, and serves as a subject matter expert for the project team.
Plans and executes the work assigned, and coordinates and reviews the work of Field Deployment Engineers and others assigned to implement parts of the initiatives, including estimating the field support each deployment requires.
Mentors and develops junior deployment engineers, interns, and rotational assignees, raising the technical standard of pilot planning, field testing, and documentation across the team.
Builds and sustains the stakeholder coalition a deployment depends on, working with Project Field Engineers, Responsible Field Engineers, Superintendents, Construction Automation, IS&T, Procurement, ES&H, and Quality to secure access, approvals, and adoption, and interfaces with other project functions and services to optimize expertise and resources.
Monitors trends in innovation topics and standards and makes recommendations for new technology exploration to meet project needs, maintaining an informed view of the vendor landscape in robotics, autonomy, reality capture, sensing, and construction analytics.