Director, Carbon Projects

About Circular Impact

Circular Impact is a climate and social impact platform focused on helping circular economy companies quantify and monetize their environmental and social impact. Circular Impact believes the circular economy plays a unique role in solving the climate crisis and carbon and climate financing can be a tremendous catalyst for scale and growth in this space.

Our first circular economy focus is in the agriculture sector, where we are building a platform to help and incentivize smallholder farmers to adopt more regenerative practices. Regenerative agriculture involves the use of sustainable techniques (e.g., cover cropping, no tilling) and products (e.g., agricultural inputs recycled from organic waste, including fertilizer, biochar, animal feeds) to achieve two primary benefits:

(1) avoiding and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions and

(2) regenerating soil quality to improve yields, posing a win-win for the environment and smallholder farmers alike.

While the potential impact for regenerative agriculture is immense, widespread adoption is prohibited by high costs, operational complexities, and sociocultural inertia. Circular Impact strives to resolve these barriers by developing innovative new pathways for climate financing and by working with smallholder farmers and their local communities to design processes that work for them.

As the Director of Carbon Projects, you will report to the co-founders of Circular Impact and manage a small team. In this role, you will be responsible for the entire lifecycle of carbon project development: concept, eligibility, registration, monitoring and verification, and credit sales.

We are scoping this such that 50% of the role will be focused on carbon credit business development and sales with the goal to maximize the value of Circular Impact’s credits. Another 25% of the role will focus on developing new carbon credit pathways and concepts. The remaining 25% will be focused on overseeing the project management of new and existing carbon credit registrations.

This role is great for a generalist who has a strong foundation in business development / sales as well as complex process and project management.

● Lead business development and sales of carbon credits with international buyers to maximize value for Circular Impact

● Develop and implement new carbon projects focused on regenerative agriculture

● Lead project registration and verification of carbon avoidance and sequestration work with international standards bodies and VVBs

● Partner with other circular economy companies to help them register their carbon projects in the voluntary carbon markets

● Engage stakeholders across the voluntary carbon markets to scale impact

● Manage a small team (up to 2) to drive work

● Bachelor’s degree (engineering, science, or business background a plus)

●10+ years of prior work history with experience in business development / sales and/or in the voluntary carbon markets

● A relationship builder at heart as working in the voluntary carbon markets requires working with people across the value chain

● Experience with zero to one building as much of the work you will own will require concepting, testing, and implementation

● Ability to deep dive into technical concepts and complex processes while also employing an 80/20 perspective to drive projects forward

● A creative and first principles thinker as this role will involve developing new and novel ways to measure for carbon impact

● Extremely detailed oriented and numerically driven with experience with complex modeling in Excel / Google Sheets

● Prior experience with complex stakeholder and project management

● Excellent writing skills in English as this role will involve communicating technically complex and detailed processes in written form

● A deep interest in helping to solve the climate crisis working with circular economy models

Desired, but not required

● Prior experience working in the voluntary carbon markets

● Prior experience living or working in Sub-Saharan Africa

Language skills

● English fluency required

Geography

● Global remote, with preference for those within 3 hours of GMT

● Will require periodic travel to Kenya (about once / quarter)