Design-Build Estimator

About the Role

Restaurants fail because nobody does the budget work early enough. You are the person who does it early. As the first expert an operator works with—before an architect is hired, often before a lease is signed—you walk the space, scan it, draw the first layout, and put the first real number in the operator's hands. That number decides whether the dream fits the space and the money.

In most construction jobs, the estimate supports the sale. Here, the estimate is the product. The work is a series of budgets, each built from the information available at that moment, each more precise than the last, culminating in the fixed price the project is built against. This role combines estimating, design, and client work in one seat—a deliberate choice to avoid splitting the work and losing the best of both. Most companies separate estimating and design, leaving estimators to price work they didn’t design and designers to draw work they don’t price. We built this role for someone who can do both, because Budget/Lease/Design/Build doesn’t work any other way.

If you’ve spent your career excelling at both estimating and design but were asked to specialize in just one, this is the role for you. You’ll be the first person in this seat, shaping it the way you always thought it should be built.

You report to the Managing Director for early-stage budgets and to a Senior Project Manager once a project enters its design phase. You’ll collaborate daily with our Principal, project managers, trade partners, suppliers, and operators—supporting them as much as they support you.

What You'll Own

• Every budget, from the first dollar to the fixed price—accurate, on time, and defensible line by line.
• The client's first impression: the walkthrough, the scan, the first layout, and the first real number.
• The pricing system: templates, checklists, and a cost database that make every budget faster and better than the last.
• Knowledge transfer: budget reviews that enable project managers to explain and defend the numbers without you in the room.
• The feedback loop: every finished project's actual costs, reconciled and delivered by the project manager, measured against your estimate to refine the pricing book.

Responsibilities

• Meet new clients and gather existing information: floor plans, equipment lists, photos of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, the concept, and the client's target number.
• Scan the space with modern capture tools, produce accurate dimensions, and draw a test fit—a first layout of the client's concept in their actual space.
• Write design and mechanical narratives with our Principal to ensure alignment between the client and trades.
• Build the scope of work with subcontractors: lead them through the space, collect their pricing, and price finish materials with suppliers.
• Review the scope and budget internally first, then with the client, and incorporate their changes.
• Produce a landlord budget for clients negotiating leases, outlining work the landlord could reasonably do or pay for to sharpen negotiations.
• Update the budget at each design milestone as kitchen drawings, filing plans, and design specs arrive, carrying every documented change forward so the client always understands why the number moved.
• Deliver the contract budget—the fixed price.
• Ask the builder’s questions at pricing time (e.g., "When the tile meets the wall, what happens there? Who furnishes the blocking?").
• Build the company’s pricing book—unit costs, assemblies, trade rates, finish benchmarks—and direct the internal takeoff resource so every budget line includes a description anyone could build from. Every budget you finish makes the next one smarter.

How Success Is Measured

• Budget turnaround: Two weeks from complete information in hand to a budget ready for review, at every stage, on every project.
• Estimates that hold: Actual costs, reconciled by the project manager at closeout and measured against your estimate on every completed project. Results are reviewed together and fed back into the pricing book.

Work Environment

These are your goals:

• Every budget completed within its two-week deadline.
• Contract budgets that hold through construction.
• A pricing book that deepens measurably every quarter.
• Project managers who can defend their budgets without you.

This is how we measure them: The two numbers above, reviewed weekly—no surprises, no mystery metrics, no politics between you and your scoreboard.

This is what we expect:

• No budget starts on incomplete information—the team supports you with the resources you need.
• Nothing goes to a client before it’s been reviewed internally.
• Every budget line includes a written description.

This is how we review:

• Weekly on early-stage budgets with the Managing Director.
• At each design milestone with the Senior Project Manager.
• Quarterly, a review of completed-project actuals with the owners—identifying where estimates are drifting and why.

Pay

We operate on the Great Game of Business: a base salary below the big-firm number, plus a quarterly bonus tied to company profit, targeting 50% of your salary over the year. The books are open—you’ll see the score, know the plan, and understand exactly how your work impacts it. A normal year lands around 40% of salary; 50% means the whole company hit every goal. We pay this way because we want people who think like owners.

Qualifications

• Years of pricing and building commercial interiors—New York City restaurant work strongly preferred; design-build experience is ideal.
• You know what a hood run costs before anyone draws it.
• You can draw: Your test fit of a restaurant in a raw space would read as competent to an architect (seating, kitchen line, egress, the hood run).
• You’re current on the tools—space scanning, digital drawing and takeoff, structured pricing—and have opinions about the stack you’d build if given the chance.
• You’ve priced from incomplete information and know how to carry unknowns as named allowances instead of refusing to give a number.
• You’re comfortable in front of people: You can run a budget review a restaurant owner follows and a subcontractor respects, and you’d rather be in the room than behind it.
• You can manage several budgets at once against real deadlines—with a system, not just effort—and prefer going deep on a managed portfolio over churning a bid list.