Project Risk Manager (Mega Projects)

Nexus Engineering Group•Cleveland, OH

About The Position

The Project Risk Manager is accountable for comprehensive and cross-functional project risk identification, prioritization, and response planning. This role facilitates risk workshops, documents and codifies risk information, analyzes risk and project information, and provides risk findings to the project team and project leadership. This role embeds risk management within the broader project controls ecosystem linking cost, schedule, change, performance, and governance to provide early warning and credible forecasts. This raises risk awareness and supports the maximizing of risk response effectiveness. The position partners closely with engineering, procurement, construction, contracts, and senior leadership to systematically identify, quantify, mitigate, and communicate risks and opportunities across all phases of the project lifecycle from conceptual design through commissioning and startup.

Requirements

Bachelorâs degree in Engineering, Construction Management, Project Management, or related discipline
8+ years of experience in project analysis, risk management, project controls, or major capital project delivery
Experience supporting large megaprojects ($500M+; multibillion preferred)
Proficient in project governance methodologies like the Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI) and Front End Loading (FEL) Index
Strong understanding of integrated project controls, including cost, schedule, risk, change, and performance management
Experience capturing and documenting lessons learned
Demonstrated experience applying quantitative risk analysis to real world project decisions
Ability to translate complex project data into clear, defensible insights for senior leadership
Excellent facilitation, analytical, writing, and executive communication skills

Nice To Haves

strong understanding of the project lifecycle, information maturity
demonstrated ability to manage information uncertainty to drive proactive risk management
Experience in EPC/EPCm environments on complex, multi-stakeholder projects
Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive risk-informed decision making.

Responsibilities

Establish and govern an enterprise grade project-level risk management framework aligned to mega-project governance with project controls, stage gates, and executive oversight
Integrate qualitative and quantitative risk analysis with cost and schedule forecasting to support contingency setting, forecasting, and project management decisions
Serve as an independent, objective advisor to project leadership on project health, uncertainty, and emerging threats with authority to challenge assumptions and forecasts
Enable proactive, analytics-based decision-making through clear risk reporting, trends, and early warning indicators through integrated cost/schedule analytics and scenario modeling.
Embed a strong risk culture across the project team, emphasizing risk ownership, monitoring, mitigation execution, and accountability
Own integration of risk into project forecasts and contingency strategy
Develop and maintain the project risk management plan, risk taxonomy, scoring criteria, and governance cadence
Lead structured, cross functional risk identification and mitigation workshops across engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning
Maintain a high-quality, audit ready risk register with clear risk statements, ownership, triggers, and residual risk
Perform cost and schedule quantitative risk analysis, quantifying uncertainty into probabilistic cost and schedule forecasts
Validate and recommend contingency levels based on quantitative analysis, track risk burndown, and assess mitigation effectiveness over time
Lead integration with project controls on baseline strategy, forecast credibility, progress measurement, and performance trends
Evaluate supply chain and execution risks, including long lead equipment, fabrication, logistics, labor, productivity, and site constraints and assess impact on cost, schedule and execution strategy.
Interface with contracts and commercial teams to assess risk allocation, change exposure, and claims risk
Monitor regulatory, permitting, interconnection, and stakeholder related risks
Produce concise executive level dashboards, narratives, and decision support materials
Support stage gate reviews, independent project assessments, and assurance activities
Perform Monte Carlo based Cost and Schedule Risk Analysis
Define and standardize risk workshop methodology and facilitation approach