Design Build Project Manager Jobs in Fort Lee, NJ

The Role

Restaurants fail because nobody does the budget work early enough. You are the person who does it early. You are the first Cocozza 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. In this one, the estimate is the product.

The work is a series of budgets; each built from the information that exists at that moment, each more precise than the last, ending in the fixed price the project is built against. It is estimating, design and client work in one seat, and that is deliberate. Most companies split this work in two and lose the best of both: the estimator prices work someone else designed and never meets the client; the designer draws work someone else prices and never owns the number. We built one seat for the person who can do both, because Budget/Lease/Design/Build does not work any other way. If you have spent your career being good at both and asked to be only one, this is the seat. You will be the first person in it, building 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 work daily with our Principal, our project managers, our trade partners, our suppliers and our operators; they are there to support you as much as you support them.

What You'll Own

1. Every budget, first dollar to fixed price — accurate, on time, and defensible line by line.
2. The client's first impression of Cocozza — the walkthrough, the scan, the first layout, the first real number.
3. The pricing system — the templates, checklists, and cost database that make every budget faster and better than the last.
4. The knowledge transfer — budget reviews that leave our project managers able to explain and defend the numbers without you in the room.
5. The feedback loop — every finished project's actual costs, reconciled and delivered to you by the project manager who built the job, measured against your estimate with the lessons carried into the pricing book.

What You'll Do

• Meet new clients and gather what exists: floor plans, equipment lists, photos of the 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, so the client and the trades are working from the same understanding of the project.
• Build the scope of work with our subcontractors: lead them through the space on a walkthrough, collect their pricing, and price finish materials with our suppliers.
• Review the scope and then the budget — internally first, then with the client — and fold their changes back in.
• Produce a landlord budget when a client is still negotiating their lease: the work a landlord could reasonably do or pay for, used to sharpen the negotiation.
• 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 knows exactly why the number moved.
• Deliver the contract budget — the fixed price.
• Ask the builder's questions at pricing time: when the tile meets the wall, what happens there? Who furnishes the blocking? Etc.
• Build the company's pricing book — unit costs, assemblies, trade rates, finish benchmarks — and direct the internal takeoff resource so every budget line carries a description anyone could build from. Every budget you finish makes the next one smarter.

How Success Is Measured

Two numbers, reviewed weekly:

• 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 delivered to you, measured against your estimate on every completed project, with the results reviewed together and fed back into the pricing book.

What Working Here Is Like

These are your goals. Every budget inside its two-week clock. Contract budgets that hold through construction. A pricing book that gets measurably deeper every quarter. Project managers who can defend their budgets without you.

This is how we measure them. The two numbers above, in a weekly review — 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 and the resources you need to do your job. Nothing goes to a client before it's been reviewed internally. Every budget line carries 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 — where the estimates are drifting, and why.

This is how you're paid. We run on the Great Game of Business: a base salary that sits below the big-firm number, plus a quarterly bonus tied to company profit that targets 50% of your salary over the year. The books are open — you'll see the score, you'll know the plan, and you'll know exactly how your work moves 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.

This is what your clients should experience. The first construction company that ever gave them a real number before they signed a lease — delivered by the person who scanned their space, drew their kitchen, and walked the trades through it. And months later, the number turned out to be right. They will remember you specifically.

This is how you should feel. Trusted with the front door of a growing company. Equipped with the best tools available and the standing to keep them current. Building something permanent instead of clearing a bid queue.

What You Bring

• Years of pricing and building commercial interiors — New York City restaurant work strongly preferred; design-build experience is the ideal background. 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 you have opinions about the stack you'd build if someone finally let you.
• You've priced from incomplete information and know how to carry the 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 carry several budgets at once against real deadlines — with a system, not just effort — and you'd rather go deep on a managed portfolio than churn a bid list.

COCOZZA is the restaurant construction company built to solve the biggest problem in the industry: most restaurants fail before they ever open. They fail because operators sign leases without knowing what their build will cost, and the traditional process makes them wait until the drawings are finished to find out. Our proprietary Budget/Lease/Design/Build process fixes that. We join the project as part of the design team from day one and put a real budget in the operator's hands before they sign their lease. That budget sharpens at every stage of design and lands at a fixed price the operator can trust. We believe it is the most reliable, efficient and operator-focused way to build restaurants in New York City, and we hire people who want to master it.

We build restaurants and bars across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and we build them the way great hospitality teams operate: with clarity, preparation and genuine care. We take ownership early, eliminate surprises, and protect the capital and timeline of every operator we serve. From our NoMad office, project teams, architects and clients collaborate inside a proven system: modern software, upstream planning, one method from concept through opening in the best restaurant city in the world. Every number in that system starts with the seat described below. In most companies, estimating supports the business.