Senior Contracts Administrator

Talent Right; Sydney; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Talent Right partners with a specialist construction contractor to recruit a Senior Contracts Administrator. You will own the contract lifecycle from award through to close-out, reading head contracts, building risk registers, and managing payments, variations and final accounts.

The role requires a proactive, entitlement-focused mindset with strong forecasting, cost reporting, and collaboration with project managers across offices nationwide. Open to candidates in any state with an office.

Qualifications

• At least five years administering contracts in construction subcontracting.
• Fluent across head contracts, subcontracts, variations, extensions of time, claims and final accounts.
• Persistent approach to pursue entitlement and resolve disputes.

Responsibilities

• Set up the commercial position for each project and maintain risk registers and departures schedules.
• Establish contract registers, obligation trackers and reporting processes.
• Manage head contract and subcontract claims, variations, notices, and final accounts.
• Close out contracts with final claims, retained amounts and reconciled financials.

Tools

Jonas Premier

Job description

Talent Right is partnering with a specialist construction contractor to recruit a Senior Contracts Administrator.

Most contracts administrators inherit a contract somebody else negotiated and hand it on before the final account is settled. This one is different. You pick a project up at award, set the commercial position yourself, run it through construction, and close it out. The full lifecycle, on your own projects.

It will suit someone who chases what they are owed. Entitlement does not collect itself, and a variation left sitting quietly becomes a variation written off. Our client wants someone who stays on it and sees it through.

About the Client

Our client is a specialist subcontractor on major construction and infrastructure work, with projects and offices spread across the country.

Contracts come to them from tier one builders, and they engage their own subcontractors beneath that, some sizeable and some smaller businesses. You will be reading, negotiating and administering agreements at both ends of that chain.

They used to run state by state, but now they run as one national business, and the commercial side is being built out to match. Standards and systems are being written now rather than inherited from twenty years ago.

About the Role

Reporting to the Commercial Manager, you take a project and hold its commercial position for the life of it.

That starts before a shovel moves. You read the head contract properly, build the risk register and departures schedule off what you find, and get the payment terms, security and retention understood rather than assumed. You negotiate and execute the conditions, finalise qualifications and subcontract templates, and have the registers and obligation trackers running before the project does.

Through construction, the rhythm takes over: claims up to the head contractor, claims down from subcontractors, variations, notices, extensions of time and the correspondence that supports all of it. You keep the cost value reconciliation current, forecast where the project will finish, sit down weekly with the project managers, and feed the monthly reporting.

Then you finish the job properly, which is the part most people rush. Final claims, final accounts, retention released, subcontract accounts closed, financials reconciled, and the lessons written down while they are still fresh.

Our client is open to candidates in any state where they have an office.

Key Responsibilities

Set up the commercial position

• Review head contract commercial conditions, liabilities, payment terms, security and retention requirements
• Build the commercial risk register and departures schedule
• Capture commercial commitments and scope changes
• Finalise commercial qualifications and subcontract templates
• Negotiate and execute contract conditions and expenditure caps
• Manage early-works approvals and procurement authorisations
• Secure insurances, guarantees and contractual documentation
• Establish contract registers and obligation trackers

Talent Right is partnering with a specialist construction contractor to recruit a Senior Contracts Administrator.

Most contracts administrators inherit a contract somebody else negotiated and hand it on before the final account is settled. This one is different. You pick a project up at award, set the commercial position yourself, run it through construction, and close it out. The full lifecycle, on your own projects.

It will suit someone who chases what they are owed. Entitlement does not collect itself, and a variation left sitting quietly becomes a variation written off. Our client wants someone who stays on it and sees it through.

About the Client

Our client is a specialist subcontractor on major construction and infrastructure work, with projects and offices spread across the country.

Contracts come to them from tier one builders, and they engage their own subcontractors beneath that, some sizeable and some smaller businesses. You will be reading, negotiating and administering agreements at both ends of that chain.

They used to run state by state, but now they run as one national business, and the commercial side is being built out to match. Standards and systems are being written now rather than inherited from twenty years ago.

About the Role

Reporting to the Commercial Manager, you take a project and hold its commercial position for the life of it.

That starts before a shovel moves. You read the head contract properly, build the risk register and departures schedule off what you find, and get the payment terms, security and retention understood rather than assumed. You negotiate and execute the conditions, finalise qualifications and subcontract templates, and have the registers and obligation trackers running before the project does.

Through construction, the rhythm takes over: claims up to the head contractor, claims down from subcontractors, variations, notices, extensions of time and the correspondence that supports all of it. You keep the cost value reconciliation current, forecast where the project will finish, sit down weekly with the project managers, and feed the monthly reporting.

Then you finish the job properly, which is the part most people rush. Final claims, final accounts, retention released, subcontract accounts closed, financials reconciled, and the lessons written down while they are still fresh.

Our client is open to candidates in any state where they have an office.

Key Responsibilities

Set up the commercial position

• Review head contract commercial conditions, liabilities, payment terms, security and retention requirements
• Build the commercial risk register and departures schedule
• Capture commercial commitments and scope changes
• Finalise commercial qualifications and subcontract templates
• Negotiate and execute contract conditions and expenditure caps
• Manage early-works approvals and procurement authorisations
• Secure insurances, guarantees and contractual documentation
• Establish contract registers and obligation trackers

Establish reporting and subcontracts

• Execute the head contract and prepare the contract brief
• Transfer WBS budgets into the ERP, and establish revenue and margin forecasts
• Execute subcontracts and purchase orders
• Verify subcontractor compliance requirements and insurances
• Establish progress claim schedules and cost reporting
• Issue commencement notices and contractual correspondence

Run the contract through construction

• Manage head contract and subcontract claims processes
• Administer variations, notices, extensions of time and correspondence
• Maintain the cost value reconciliation and forecast final cost
• Hold a weekly project review with the project managers
• Support the monthly project reporting dashboard
• Manage latent conditions, prime cost and provisional sum adjustments, and disputes

Close it out

• Finalise claims, final accounts and retention releases
• Close subcontract accounts and contractual obligations
• Reconcile project financials and final margin outcomes
• Archive commercial documentation and record lessons learned

The Ideal Candidate

• At least five years administering contracts in construction subcontracting
• Fluent across head contracts, subcontracts, variations, extensions of time, claims and final accounts
• Persistent. You pursue entitlement and bring a dispute to a decision instead of letting it drift
• Rigorous with registers, cost reporting and forecasting, and quick to notice when a number stops making sense
• Used to dealing upward with large head contractors and downward with small subcontractors in the same week
• Easy to work with for project managers, and reliable on a reporting rhythm
• Thorough at close-out, including the parts that are nobody's favourite

Our client is looking for people who have sat on the contractor side of the table. If your background is client-side, with a principal or a consultancy assessing claims rather than making them, the day-to-day here will feel unfamiliar.

You will need to be at home in a construction ERP. If you have used Jonas Premier, that is a head start.

Why This Role?

• End-to-end ownership of your projects, rather than a handover at award and another before close-out
• Work at both ends of the contract chain, which is rarer than it sounds and builds a stronger commercial head
• A short reporting line to the Commercial Manager, with no layers in between
• Location flexibility, open to any state where our client has an office
• Standards and systems being set now, so you are not working around legacy processes
• Competitive base and superannuation, depending on experience