Capture Lead – Mission Systems Engineering

Role Overview

• First and foremost, this role is about converting qualified sales opportunities into contracted work in our order book.
• You will work across sales, engineering and delivery to make that happen, but you will be expected to do the substantive work yourself – shaping bids, structuring arguments and driving submissions.
• This is not a managerial post; it is a hands-on capture role with direct accountability for outcomes.
• Lead enterprise-scale sales opportunities (typically £10M+) from origination to closure, ensuring momentum across qualification, capture, bid, negotiation, and contracting.
• Develop clear win strategies, including competitor analysis, differentiation, and risk mitigation.
• Identify, evaluate, and secure strategic industry partners to form bid winning teams.
• Work closely with revenue operations and executive leadership to ensure robust sales discipline and accountability.
• While this is not a line management role, we would expect you to use your experience to raise the standard of capture across the business – coaching colleagues, sharing judgement and helping others think more clearly about how we pursue and win work:
• Role model the behaviours and habits of a high-performing sales organisation
• energising the team, reinforcing customer-centricity, and fostering accountability and ownership.
• Guide and coach the wider team to develop capture strategies across key verticals: defence, national security, emergency response, and Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).

Requirements

• Strong track record of closing complex enterprise sales (ideally £10M+ deals) within the public sector.
• Deep knowledge of UK public sector procurement regulations, routes to market, and multi-year contracting.
• Proven ability to guide opportunity strategy
• incorporating capture planning, stakeholder mapping, bid development, and win themes.
• Experience engaging both technical and non-technical stakeholders, with the ability to bridge engineering depth and executive-level messaging.

Benefits

We are committed to building a flexible, inclusive, and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills, experience, and backgrounds, so please apply and come as you are!

We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We typically operate a flexible, hybrid-working model, with an average 3 days in the office each week (dependent on the role). We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility, part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.

Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company, and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.

Finally, if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience, we’d still love to hear from you!