Position: Proposal Manager
Firm-wide ownership of the proposal and pursuit process across all sectors
Location: North York, Ontario
Scope: Firm-wide, all sectors
About the role
The Proposal Manager owns the process of producing PRI's proposals and bids: the RFP, RFQ, and RFEI responses that win the firm's work across all five sectors. This is a coordination-, writing-, and deadline-driven role at the centre of the firm's business development engine. The Proposal Manager does not write the technical approach, which comes from the firm's engineers, scientists, and technical leads, but owns everything around it: interpreting requirements, building and driving the proposal schedule, assembling and writing non-technical content, ensuring full compliance with submission requirements, managing production and formatting, and getting complete, compliant, compelling submissions out the door on time.
PRI pursues work across public and private clients in transportation and infrastructure, earth and environment, property and buildings, energy and resources, and renewable energy. Much of this work is won through structured, process-heavy public-sector procurement, where a single missed mandatory requirement can disqualify an otherwise winning bid. The Proposal Manager is the person who makes sure that never happens, and who turns a pile of technical input and a tight deadline into a polished, persuasive, on-time submission.
The role coordinates firm-wide: with Sector Vice Presidents and Account Managers who own the pursuit and client relationship, with Practice Leads and technical staff who provide the technical content, and with the Marketing Manager on branded content, collateral, and messaging. The Proposal Manager reports to the Proposal / CRM Lead and is central to the firm's win rate and growth.
Responsibilities
Proposal process and delivery
- Own the end-to-end proposal process. Manage each pursuit from go decision through submission, including schedule, roles, content, reviews, production, and delivery.
- Interpret RFP, RFQ, and RFEI requirements. Read solicitations closely, build compliance matrices, and translate requirements into a clear plan and section-by-section outline.
- Build and drive the proposal schedule. Set milestones (kickoff, content deadlines, reviews, production, submission) and hold contributors to them, escalating early when a pursuit is at risk.
- Coordinate contributors. Assign sections to technical and commercial contributors and secure their input on time, driving busy senior staff without direct authority over them.
- Manage production and submission. Own formatting, assembly, quality checks, and final production. Ensure every submission is complete, compliant, correctly formatted, and delivered on or before deadline through the required channel.
Writing, editing, and content
- Write and edit non-technical proposal content. Draft executive summaries, cover letters, firm and team narratives, project understanding, and other non-technical sections.
- Edit technical input for clarity and consistency. Shape engineers' and scientists' technical content into clear, persuasive, consistent prose in PRI's voice, without altering technical substance.
- Ensure a compelling, client-focused message. Work with the pursuit lead to sharpen win themes, differentiators, and value proposition so the proposal answers what the client actually asked for.
- Maintain quality and brand standards. Ensure every submission meets PRI's quality, formatting, and brand standards, coordinating with the Marketing Manager as needed.
Content library and knowledge management
- Build and maintain the proposal content library. Own reusable content, including boilerplate, firm and office descriptions, project sheets, staff resumes, past-performance records, and standard qualifications, keeping it current and easy to draw on.
- Maintain pursuit records in the firm's systems. Keep proposal, opportunity, and win/loss data current in the firm's CRM (HubSpot), supporting accurate pipeline reporting and post-pursuit analysis.
- Capture and apply lessons learned. Run debriefs on significant wins and losses and feed insights back into future pursuits and the content library.
Coordination and continuous improvement
- Support go/no-go decisions. Provide pursuit leads and the Proposal / CRM Lead with the information needed to make disciplined go/no-go calls, including effort, fit, and competitive read.
- Improve the proposal function over time. Refine templates, checklists, workflows, and standards so the firm produces better proposals more efficiently as pursuit volume grows.
- Mentor proposal coordinators. As the function grows, guide and develop junior proposal and marketing coordinators supporting pursuits.
- Coordinate across sectors and offices. Balance and prioritize concurrent pursuits across the firm's five sectors and multiple offices, managing competing deadlines.
Qualifications and experience
Required
- Bachelor's degree in English, Communications, Marketing, Journalism, a technical or science field, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience.
- Minimum 5 years of proposal, bid, or pursuit management experience, ideally in engineering, architecture, construction, environmental, or a related professional-services or infrastructure environment.
- Demonstrated experience managing the full proposal lifecycle for complex RFPs, including public-sector procurement.
- Excellent writing and editing skills, with the ability to produce clear, persuasive business writing and to edit technical content to a consistent voice.
- Strong project-management ability under firm, immovable deadlines, coordinating many contributors and moving parts.
- Meticulous attention to compliance detail, with the discipline to catch every mandatory requirement, page limit, and submission instruction.
- Advanced Microsoft Word skills (styles, templates, complex formatting), and comfort with Adobe Acrobat for production.
- Ability to work with, and drive input from, busy senior professionals without direct authority, with diplomacy and persistence.
- Composure and organization under pressure, including proposal crunch periods.
Preferred
- Proposal experience specifically in the AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) sector.
- Experience with public-sector procurement at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels across BC, Alberta, and Ontario.
- Adobe InDesign skills for designed proposal production.
- Experience with a professional-services CRM, ideally HubSpot.
- Comfort using AI tools to accelerate drafting, editing, and research.
- APMP certification (Foundation, Practitioner, or Professional), or SMPS membership/certification.
- Experience mentoring proposal or marketing coordinators, or building out a proposal function.
- Familiarity with the engineering-consulting pursuit environment and the role of technical leads in proposals.
What we're really looking for
Beyond credentials, the strongest proposal managers share three traits: they drive senior people to deliver on time without formal authority; they catch the compliance details that disqualify bids; and they stay calm and organized when several pursuits crunch at once. We will be looking for evidence of all three.
