Chief Estimator

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Professional Employment Group of Colorado provided pay range

This range is provided by Professional Employment Group of Colorado. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$150,000.00/yr - $200,000.00/yr

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Helping Professionals Accelerate Career Growth with Top Companies

The Chief Estimator plays a key role in triaging bid opportunities, participating in go/no-go decisions, and facilitating cross-functional bid review meetings. This position directly supports Apex’s growth strategy in public works, utility district contracts, and on-call service agreements.

Core Responsibilities

Bid Strategy & Opportunity Triage

• Evaluate IFB/RFB in collaboration with the Bid Coordinator, assessing scope complexity, alignment with Apex’s core capabilities, margin potential, and resource availability.
• Actively participate in weekly go/no-go meetings, providing technical input, risk assessment, and early pricing considerations.
• Manage estimating team to review takeoffs, pricing of direct and indirect costs, and development of accurate production rates based on current market conditions and historical data.
• Build bids in HCSS HeavyBid, ensuring all assumptions are validated by field feedback and actual production data.
• Collaborate with the Bid Coordinator to ensure complete subcontractor/vendor coverage and document management.
• Manage estimators to ensure proper setup of labor, bond, insurance, and cost structure in each bid.
• Lead estimating teams on multi-disciplinary bids, providing oversight on takeoffs, subcontractor scopes, and indirect cost allocations.
• Facilitate bid review meetings with executives, PMs, and superintendents to validate assumptions and highlight risks before submission.
• Develop and implement SOPs for scope reviews, rate validations, and quantity takeoffs to improve consistency and accuracy across the estimating team.
• Conduct postmortem reviews with operations and finance to analyze estimate-to-actual performance and identify continuous improvement opportunities.
• Partner with the Controller and CEO to improve forecasting models and field productivity baselines.
• Support dashboard and KPI development for real-time estimating metrics, hit rates, and margin variance.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of estimating experience in civil construction with a focus on water, sewer, and underground utilities.
• 3+ years leading or managing an estimating team on projects $2M+.
• Proficient in HCSS HeavyBid (or similar), takeoff software (including PlanSwift and/or Bluebeam), and Microsoft Excel.
• Familiarity with public works contracting methods (unit price, T&M, design-bid-build, on-call, CMGC).
• Strong understanding of crew-based production, job cost tracking, and field operations.

Key Attributes

• Understands the importance of collaboration and mentorship.
• Team-first mindset with ability to mentor junior estimators and collaborate across departments.
• Strong interpersonal skills, capable of working effectively with larger GCs, municipalities, and water/wastewater districts.
• Strategic thinker with strong technical estimating skills and attention to risk.
• Strong communicator capable of leading collaborative bid reviews with field and executive teams.
• Comfortable triaging high volumes of opportunities and reprioritizing rapidly.
• Proactive, organized, and motivated to win work that aligns with strengths.

#PEG1

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $100,000.00 - $210,000.00 per year

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Project Management

• Industries

  Construction

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Inferred from the description for this job

Medical insurance

Vision insurance

401(k)

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