Commercial Manager - Distributed Energy

Job title: Commercial Manager – Distributed Energy Finance

Location: London or South East (Hybrid)

Workplace type: Hybrid, 2 days a week in the office

Salary: £70,000 – £76,000 + bonus + benefits

About the business

My client is a private equity-backed UK energy infrastructure group with its own committed funding. Its low carbon team finances behind-the-meter assets for industrial and commercial customers: solar PV, battery storage, EV charging and heat pumps.

Customers avoid the upfront capital cost. My client provides the funding and, depending on the structure, owns and operates the assets. Deals come through installers, finance brokers, strategic partners and a growing direct sales function.

The products you'll work on:

• Finance leases, where the customer rents the assets and gets the benefits of ownership without the capex
• PPAs, where my client owns and runs the system and sells the power
• Rental models that bundle funding with a turnkey installation
• Bespoke and project finance-style structures, where the funder takes an interest in asset performance

The role

You'll join a small commercial team reporting into the commercial leadership. Sales owns the customer relationship and brings deals in. You shape them, test them against investment criteria and take them to signature. Your involvement grows at every stage:

• Shaping: assess strategic fit, counterparty credit, execution risk and returns, and push back on deals that won't clear investment committee
• Pricing: work through project economics, customer benefits, returns and sensitivities using existing models. You don't build them from scratch, but you need to know when an assumption doesn't hold.
• Pre-contract: agree the commercial fundamentals through heads of terms
• Investment approval: prepare and challenge investment papers and handle committee questions
• Negotiation and contracting: lead or support negotiations within agreed parameters, and work with legal on customer contracts, supplier agreements, introducer agreements and ancillary transaction documents
• Execution and handover: manage conditions precedent and supplier milestones, then hand over cleanly to delivery and asset management

You'll run several deals at once, from single-site installs to multi-million-pound, multi-technology schemes. You'll also build the templates, checklists and processes that make each product repeatable. The role is external facing, with regular meetings with customers, brokers and suppliers.

What you'll bring

• Experience where energy or infrastructure meets financing. PPA, asset finance, leasing or project finance experience is strongly preferred.
• Commercial judgement: you know what an investor should and shouldn't accept, and you'll hold a position
• Contract experience: you've led the commercial or contractual side of negotiations, even if only part of a transaction
• Confidence working in a financial model and interpreting pricing, credit and returns
• Strong organisation, high standards on detail, and people who like working with you

Relevant backgrounds include funders, developers, IPPs and transaction advisory.