Role: Principal Consultant - Life Cycle Assessment

Location: US Flexible

Role ID: 2023 - 1719

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Ricardo Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

The sustainability team at Ricardo Energy & Environment helps clients to understand and then reduce their environmental and social impacts. A key tool in this process is life cycle assessment (LCA), which examines such impacts across the full life cycle of a product or service.  We have delivered a significant number of LCA projects over the last five years across a broad range of products and sectors from automotive to building materials to specific low carbon technologies.

LCA is a key growth area for the business, and we are currently looking for an experienced Principal  Consultant to join our rapidly growing LCA team.

Key Responsibilities

We are seeking to recruit an experienced Principal Consultant with a strong track record of winning and delivering work related to LCA. Your ability to identify and develop new opportunities is important, as is the ability to hold strategic conversations at a senior level including assessing needs, developing technical propositions and taking clients on their sustainability journey.

The successful candidate will:

• Lead the delivery of complex LCA projects or tasks within such projects, including responsibility  for client satisfaction, timely delivery, project financial management and ensuring high-quality outputs.
• Lead, manage and contribute to the development of proposals for new work.
• Be experienced in building LCA models, including Microsoft Excel and software packages such as SimaPro or GaBi, and be able to support and train more junior colleagues in developing LCA models using these platforms.
• Have a detailed understanding of the relevant ISO standards, as well as other methodologies relating to LCA, such as carbon footprinting, EPDs, PCRs and PEF.
• Provide senior-level expert quality assurance and technical review of project deliverables, including ensuring models outputs are valid and checking reports conformity to standards such as ISO 140444.
• Develop and maintain close client and partner relationships to support the winning of new business.
• Ensure appropriate profile raising and marketing of Ricardo’s services and capabilities.

Ricardo operates a parallel ‘team leader’ system for pastoral staff management, meaning that you will not initially have any direct line management responsibilities. However, if such line management is of interest to you, we can help you to demonstrate and develop that capability.

Key competencies and experience

• Significant experience of managing and delivering LCA projects in accordance with international standards.

• Significant practical career experience and be able to demonstrate relevant technical capability, effective project management and excellent communication skills.
• Higher education qualification (Bachelor’s Degree) in an environmental discipline, or otherwise to have a good track record working in an environmental role, so that you can demonstrate your knowledge.
• Experience of working in the consultancy sector, or organisational responsibility for the outputs from contracted consultants, to demonstrate that you have the necessary commercial awareness. We would also be interested to talk to candidates currently performing roles directly within industry especially where they have a strong commercial awareness.
• Experience of identifying and developing business opportunities.

Skills and behaviours

• Excellent analytical skills with ability to identify, develop and implement solutions.
• Excellent writing skills to communicate clearly and without errors – accuracy and attention to detail are vital.
• Strong client and stakeholder communication skills (e.g. influencing, negotiation, presentation, relationship management).
• Ability to develop client propositions (e.g. understanding of client challenges and develop and propose suitable solutions).
• Ability to build and lead teams, and to coordinate and prioritise activities to ensure delivery of work on time and to budget.
• Ability to work autonomously and pro-actively.
• High level of computer literacy, including familiarity with the full Microsoft Office software suite.
• A flexible approach – able to see where help is needed and support colleagues as necessary.
• Be comfortable juggling a variety of tasks in a sometimes fast-paced operational environment.
• LCACP and CLAR certification would be an advantage.

Working here

Ricardo is an exciting and rewarding place to work and you have the opportunity to make a difference. You will work with teams of talented, dedicated, and supportive individuals. Alongside having a fantastic opportunity to develop your career with us through our broad range of projects, mentoring opportunities and a personalised approach to your learning and development. We are always keen to hear from people who have driven, ambition and a flair for innovative thinking.

Wellbeing and work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that's working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. Our People are important to us, and we take pride in our wellbeing programmes and policies that support individuals including flexible working, carers policy, mental health first aiders and readily available support through our extensive Employee Assistance programme.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees to ensure an inclusive culture, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.