Project Director, Urban Design and Development

This Opportunity 

The role of Project Director, Major Capital Projects (Senior 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 deadline requires it. 

Connecting Disciplines 

• Assemble integrated project approaches across planning, transportation engineering, structures, civil, environmental, landscape architecture, architecture, buildings, water, and resilience. 
• Establish working relationships and named points of contact in other disciplines so that urban development opportunities are recognized early. 
• Bring the practice’s front-end work into the pipeline of the buildings and infrastructure business lines, and bring their capability into the practice’s pursuits. 
• Coordinate with teams working on the vertical development program where the practice’s work sits alongside building or infrastructure design. 

People and Profile 

• Help recruit, mentor, and develop planning and design staff, and identify latent urban design capability already inside the firm. 
• Be a leader in the practice’s external presence and thought leadership, including conference and panel participation, published writing, awards submissions, and select competitions. 
• Maintain and extend board, institutional, and academic affiliations that carry weight with the practice’s client base. 
• Develop business development capability in mid-level and senior staff, and support their emergence as recognized voices in the market. 

Who You Are 

Talent is the essence of meeting our clients’ objectives, goals, and challenges. This role suits a senior design leader who has built a practice and a public reputation around large, contested, publicly consequential projects, and who is ready to apply that to the breadth of capability WSP already holds. 

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Planning, or a related field from an accredited program, or equivalent professional standing. 
• Minimum of 15 years of experience in urban design, master planning, and large-scale development, including a leadership role in a design or multidisciplinary professional practice. 
• Registration as an architect, AICP certification, or an equivalent professional credential. 
• Demonstrated record of originating work, including client relationships that have produced repeat commissions at scale. 
• Direct experience leading master plans and development frameworks for major transportation facilities, station districts, waterfront and resilience districts, or large publicly initiated redevelopment sites. 
• Command of the public development process, including entitlement, zoning and rezoning, environmental review, community engagement, capital programming, and the relationship between public investment and private development value. 
• Established relationships with public agencies and authorities in the New York metropolitan region. 
• Ability to lead multidisciplinary teams of engineers, planners, environmental specialists, landscape architects, and architects, in both prime and subconsultant positions. 
• Excellent verbal, written, graphic, and interpersonal communication skills, including in public and adversarial settings. 
• Capable, dedicated, and proven leader who is a self-starter and holds themselves accountable for delivery. 
• Ability to travel approximately 20 percent, primarily regional. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Master’s degree in Architecture, Urban Design, Urban Planning, or a related field from an accredited program, or equivalent professional standing. 
• 20+ years of experience in urban design, master planning, and large-scale development, including a leadership role in a design or multidisciplinary professional practice. 
• Recognized public profile in the urban design and planning community, evidenced by published writing, speaking, teaching, jury service, or board membership. 
• Experience with alternative delivery and public-private partnership procurements. 
• Experience across both public sector and private development client relationships. 

WSP Benefits:   
 WSP provides a comprehensive suite of benefits focused on a providing health and financial stability throughout the employee’s career. These benefits include coverage related to medical, dental, vision, disability, and life; retirement savings; paid sick leave; paid vacation (or other personal time); paid parental leave; and paid time off for purposes of bereavement, voting, and/or attendance at naturalization proceedings.

Compensation:

Expected Salary (all locations): $202,700 - $300,000

WSP USA is providing the compensation range and general description of other compensation and benefits that the company in good faith believes it might pay and/or offer for this position based on the successful applicant’s education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities in addition to internal equity and geographic location. WSP USA reserves the right to ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and offer additional benefits and other compensation, depending on circumstances not related to an applicant’s sex or other status protected by local, state, or federal law. 

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