Project Director, Urban Design and Development

Job Description This Opportunity The role of Project Director, Major Capital Projects (Vice President) is a senior leadership position within the Transportation practice, with shared responsibility for the direction, growth, and market position of the practice. The role will help lead and grow WSP’s Transportation work on projects that are reshaping how American cities build and integrate their infrastructure, bringing a strong design sensibility to the practice.

The practice originates and leads complex development programs at and around major transportation assets, including station districts, rail yard and infrastructure overbuilds, waterfront and resilience districts, and large mixed-use redevelopment sites. The role will help develop a strong project vision that wins client, community, and funding support, drawing on WSP’s multidisciplinary planning, engineering, environmental, landscape, architecture, and advisory capability across the firm.

Transportation design operates as the integrating layer between disciplines, translating technical capability, economic understanding, and political awareness into physical propositions for a place. The Project Director will bring design leadership, team leadership, and client relationship management responsibility to the work. The role will help set design direction for projects and pursuits, provide leadership and input through quality review and feedback, and deliver the practice’s design viewpoint to clients, agencies, communities, and the wider profession. The Project Director will be responsible for assembling and directing both internal teams and external consultant teams.

Business development and project origination are key to the role. The Project Director is expected to open and hold senior client relationships, to shape opportunities in advance of procurement, and to convert relationships across public agencies, authorities, institutions, and developers into work for the practice and for the wider firm.

Your Impact Project Leadership

• Work with the Project Leader on the direction, growth, staffing, and financial performance of the Transportation practice.
• In collaboration with the Project Leader, lead or co-lead internal and client relationships, with authority to commit the practice to pursuits, teaming arrangements, and project approaches.
• Contribute to annual planning, target setting, and resource allocation for the practice.
• Work with regional leadership across the Transportation and Infrastructure, Property and Buildings, Earth and Environment, and Water business lines.
• Provide continuity of client relationships, market position, and practice culture over time.

Origination and Market Development

• Identify, shape, and win urban development and infrastructure programs in the Northeast and nationally, with an emphasis on the New York metropolitan region.
• Open and sustain relationships at agency executive and principal level, including transportation agencies and authorities, city and state economic and development agencies, institutions, and private developers.
• Position WSP for opportunities at the visioning and feasibility stages, with an eye toward later phases of work and developing client relationships early in the process.
• Lead and support pursuit strategy, team assembly, and proposal narrative on major pursuits, including alternative delivery and public-private partnership procurements.
• Work with business development and marketing to define the practice’s pitch narratives, including surfacing the urban development and design stories already present in WSP’s portfolio, and build practice-specific collateral and narratives.

Project and Design Leadership

• Serve as Principal-in-Charge, Project Director, or Urban Design Lead on assigned projects, with responsibility for the client relationship and for the urban design proposition.
• Set design goals and design direction at project outset, and hold design review authority at agreed milestones as appropriate across the practice’s portfolio.
• Provide design critique and quality review to teams in other disciplines and business lines where a place-based perspective strengthens the outcome or the presentation of it.
• Lead client presentations, public meetings, and stakeholder engagement on projects.
• Work with project managers on scope, budget, schedule, and deliverables, and step into direct production where a pursuit or a dead…