Service Tendering Engineer

A Service Tendering Engineer puts together the technical and commercial content of bids for service contracts - things like maintenance, repair, spare parts, upgrades and long-term support agreements for equipment or installed plant. They work out what the work would actually involve (labour hours, parts, site visits, response times), price it up, and write the proposal that goes back to the customer. Typical employers are manufacturers and engineering firms in sectors like power, rail, lifts and escalators, HVAC, industrial machinery, water and energy, where the "service" side of the business is sold separately from the original equipment.

Starting salary: £27k–£35k
Live graduate jobs: Search all jobs
Main way in: Engineering graduate schemes at large equipment manufacturers…
They usually ask for: An engineering or technical degree is the usual ask

Approximate graduate salary

Roughly around £27,000–£35,000 to start for a graduate or junior tendering engineer, though this varies a lot by sector, employer size and location - large manufacturers, London and the South East, and energy or rail work tend to sit at the upper end, while smaller regional engineering firms often start lower. Some roles include a bonus linked to bid win rates or business performance.

What you'd actually do

Reading through customer tender documents and enquiry packs to pull out what is actually being asked for - scope of work, response times, which equipment is covered, contract length - and flagging anything ambiguous or risky
Building up a cost model in a spreadsheet or a company costing tool: engineer hours and day rates, travel, spare parts, subcontractors, consumables, overheads, and an allowance for things going wrong
Chasing internal colleagues and external suppliers for inputs - asking the parts team for component prices and lead times, asking field service managers how long a given job realistically takes, asking subcontractors for quotes
Writing the proposal itself: the technical method statement, the scope description, assumptions and exclusions, and often answers to the customer's quality, safety and sustainability questionnaires

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Sitting in bid review or approval meetings where the margin, the risk items and the contract terms are challenged before the price is signed off
Handling clarification questions after submission, revising prices when the scope changes, and handing over the detail to the delivery team if the bid is won
Keeping track of past bids and pricing benchmarks so repeat enquiries can be turned around faster

How graduates get in

Engineering graduate schemes at large equipment manufacturers and service providers - rotational schemes often include a spell in bids, tendering, sales support or service operations, and some people end up staying there. This is a common route into the role.
Direct entry as a graduate or junior tendering/bid/proposals engineer, or as an 'estimator' or 'technical sales support engineer'. These adverts exist year-round rather than only in autumn graduate recruitment season.
Moving across internally after a year or two in field service, applications engineering, project engineering or the parts/aftermarket team. This is probably the most common route overall - employers value someone who already knows how long jobs take and what the kit is like.
Starting in a contracts, procurement or commercial administration role and adding the technical side, which happens more in construction-adjacent and facilities sectors.

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A placement year or summer internship with an engineering firm's service or aftermarket division, which is a strong way in because the work is hard to demonstrate otherwise.
Apprenticeship-then-degree routes are also normal in this space - plenty of tendering engineers came up through an engineering apprenticeship rather than a three-year degree, so you may be working alongside people with very different backgrounds.

What employers ask for

An engineering or technical degree is the usual ask - mechanical, electrical, electronic, mechatronics, building services or similar, depending on the sector. The subject matters more here than in general commercial roles because you need to understand the equipment, but employers are often flexible about which engineering discipline.
Typically a 2:2 or 2:1; many employers in this space care more about relevant experience and attitude than classification, and some advertise with an HNC/HND or apprenticeship background as an acceptable alternative.
Comfort with spreadsheets is effectively a hard requirement - cost models, parts lists and price breakdowns all live in Excel at most employers.
Any exposure to real engineering environments helps a lot: a placement year, site visits, workshop experience, or a part-time role in an engineering business.

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A driving licence is often asked for, since you may need to visit customer sites to survey equipment before pricing a contract.
Professional registration (IEng or CEng through an institution such as IMechE or IET) is not needed to start and is less commonly pursued here than in design or project engineering, but some employers support it and it helps if you later move toward engineering management.

Skills that matter

Cost estimating and commercial numeracy

The core of the job is converting a vague scope into hours, parts and pounds, and understanding how margin, contingency and contract length affect whether a bid is both winnable and profitable.

Reading and interpreting technical specifications

Tender packs are long, inconsistent and often written by someone who is not an engineer, so you need to extract the real requirement and spot what has been left out.

Technical writing

A large part of the output is prose - method statements, assumptions, exclusions and answers to evaluation questions - and clear, specific writing genuinely affects whether a bid scores well.

Risk spotting

Noticing that a four-hour response time clause or an uncapped liability will cost the business far more than the price assumes is one of the most valuable things a tendering engineer does.

Chasing and coordinating people

You rarely own the inputs - parts pricing, labour availability, subcontractor quotes - so most bids come down to getting answers out of busy colleagues before a fixed deadline.

Working to hard deadlines under pressure

Tender submission dates do not move, and a bid that arrives late is usually disqualified regardless of how good it is.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Graduate or junior tendering engineer: you work on smaller or repeat enquiries, usually with a senior reviewing everything you price before it goes out.
Tendering / proposals / estimating engineer with your own enquiries: you own bids end to end for a product line or region, and start being trusted with pricing judgement rather than just cost build-up. Typically a couple of years in, but it varies with how much bid volume the business has.
Senior tendering engineer or bid manager: you lead larger or multi-discipline tenders, coordinate contributors across departments, and negotiate directly with customers on scope and terms.
From there the paths fork. Common moves are into commercial or contracts management, service sales and account management, service operations or aftermarket management, or back into project/contract delivery running the work you used to price. Some move into pricing strategy or business development.
Longer term this can lead to head of bids, service or aftermarket director, or general commercial leadership. Timelines vary widely and depend far more on company size and turnover of senior staff than on any fixed ladder.

What people get wrong

“It's a sales job with an engineering label on it.”

You are usually not the one building the customer relationship or carrying a sales target. Sales bring in the enquiry; the tendering engineer decides what it would cost to actually deliver it, and will sometimes be the person arguing that the business should walk away.

“Tendering means filling in forms and sending out a price list.”

Most of the value is in defining the scope and the assumptions. Two bids at the same headline price can be wildly different in what they commit the company to, and getting the exclusions right is often what makes a contract profitable years later.

“You price it, you win or lose, and that's the end of it.”

Service contracts run for years, so the numbers you put in follow the business for a long time. Delivery teams will come back to your assumptions when something goes wrong, which is why tendering engineers are usually expected to document their reasoning carefully.

“It's a back-office desk role with no contact with real equipment.”

Depending on the employer you may be out doing site surveys, counting assets, assessing the condition of ageing plant and talking to the engineers who maintain it, because you cannot price a maintenance contract accurately from a drawing alone.

Where this varies

Job titles and scope vary a lot. In some businesses this role is called estimator, proposals engineer, bid engineer, applications engineer or technical sales support, and the boundaries between them shift from employer to employer. In large manufacturers you may specialise narrowly - pricing one product family's service agreements - with separate bid writers, contract lawyers and pricing analysts around you. In smaller firms the same person may survey the site, price the job, write the document, negotiate the terms and then help deliver the contract. Sector matters too: public sector and utilities tenders are heavily formalised with strict portals, scoring criteria and deadlines, while private industrial work can be far more informal and quote-driven. 'Service' tendering also differs from new-equipment tendering, as you are pricing years of ongoing labour and parts rather than a one-off supply, which puts much more weight on risk assumptions and escalation than on the headline product price.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.