Senior Project Manager (with water expertise)

Great Yellow makes landscape regeneration investable and scalable.

We envision a future where regenerative land-use is the norm, delivering measurable environmental recovery, resilient food systems, and long-term economic value. Great Yellow exists create a clear, practical pathway to making this future a reality.

Today, the way we use and manage land is pushing natural and economic systems to a breaking point. Fragile food supply chains, degraded ecosystems, rising climate risk and failing infrastructure are driving real and growing costs for communities and the economy.

By rethinking how we work with land and value nature, we can create landscapes that provide clean water, abundant nature, stable production, and long term security.

Great Yellow works to drive this transformation, moving beyond extractive models to unlock economic and ecological regeneration.

We work with:

• Land Managers of ambitious nature recovery projects to plan and deliver ambitious, landscape-scale transformation

• Project Investors seeking opportunities to generate robust, risk-adjusted returns alongside verified environmental impact

• Buyers of ecosystem services seeking high-integrity, high-impact natural capital solutions to strengthen resilience and reduce nature-related risks

• And many other partners and specialists in the restoration journey

Role Overview

As Senior Project Manager with Water Expertise you will play a critical role in delivering Great Yellow’s landscape-scale natural capital programmes with a particular focus on water outcomes (e.g., catchment resilience, water quality, water resources and hydrology, aquatic ecology and biodiversity, , nature-based solutions and related co-benefits). You will be responsible for day-to-day programme execution across one or more projects in our portfolio, ensuring milestones, governance, and outputs are delivered on time and to a high standard.

Supported by the Head of Advisory, you will coordinate internal teams and external partners to maintain delivery momentum, manage risks and dependencies, and ensure our work translates into credible, measurable outcomes for clients and partners.

Key Responsibilities

1. Programme Delivery & Execution (Water-focused)

• Lead day-to-day management of assigned programmes, owning delivery plans, milestones, and reporting.

• Translate water-focused project objectives into clear workplans, scopes, and success metrics (outputs, outcomes, KPIs).

• Coordinate internal teams (advisory, analysts, experts) and external contributors (consultants, land managers, delivery partners), ensuring smooth logistics and delivery cadence.

• Manage programme-level risk, dependencies, and decision points; escalate early with proposed mitigations.

• Maintain delivery discipline across key artefacts: plans, RAID logs, decision logs, action trackers, and client-ready updates.

2. Water & Catchment Domain Leadership (Applied, not academic)

• Bring a practical understanding of water systems and catchment management, ensuring programme plans reflect real-world constraints (permissions, land access, seasonality, monitoring requirements, delivery sequencing).

• Support project teams to structure credible approaches for water outcomes and associated evidence/MRV (what data is needed, when, by whom, and for what purpose).

• Help teams navigate the “translation gap” between technical water evidence, delivery actions, and investable / fundable propositions.

• Sense-check water-related assumptions in project narratives, plans, and outputs for realism and defensibility (flagging where specialist sign-off is required).

3. Stakeholder Management & Governance

• Build and maintain strong working relationships with clients, partners, and delivery stakeholders, providing clear updates and ensuring shared accountability.

• Plan and run effective project governance rhythms: steering meetings, working groups, and delivery check-ins (agenda, pre-reads, actions, decisions).

• Anticipate stakeholder friction points (scope creep, competing priorities, unclear accountability) and resolve them through structured communication and clear delivery controls.

4. Scalable Programme Processes

• Support the Advisory leadership in developing and refining scalable programme management frameworks that improve consistency across the portfolio.

• Implement best practices in project controls (planning, reporting, change control, risk management) aligned with Great Yellow’s strategy and ways of working.

• Improve how delivery teams capture lessons learned and convert them into reusable templates and playbooks.

5. Cross-functional Collaboration

• Work closely with the Expertise and Product teams to implement tools and workflows that improve programme efficiency and evidence quality.

• Collaborate with Growth / commercial colleagues to ensure new programmes are onboarded with clear scopes, governance, and delivery readiness.

• Support knowledge-sharing across the team so water-related learning compounds across projects.

About you

• 3–5 years’ experience in project management / programme delivery, ideally within water, environment, infrastructure, catchment management, nature-based solutions, or closely related sectors.

• Demonstrated experience coordinating multi-stakeholder projects and delivering to timeline and scope (with strong project controls).

• Working knowledge of water and catchment systems and the delivery realities of water-related environmental interventions (or closely adjacent experience you can translate quickly).

• Strong stakeholder management skills: confident working with senior client contacts and technical partners; able to create clarity and momentum.

• Highly organised with strong written communication (clear plans, crisp updates, high-quality meeting outputs).

• Analytical mindset: comfortable tracking KPIs, interrogating data quality, and using evidence to drive decisions (without needing to be a modeller).

• Proficiency in project management tools and comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.

• Motivation to work on nature restoration and natural capital solutions with measurable outcomes.

Advantageous (not required)

• Familiarity with water sector policy/regulatory context, catchment partnerships, or water company investment planning cycles.

• Strong understanding of agriculture and land management operations and overlap with achieving water objectives

• Experience working with GIS outputs, environmental datasets, or monitoring frameworks (interpreting and translating into delivery plans).

Why Join Great Yellow?

• Be part of an innovative start-up building the commercial and delivery infrastructure for landscape regeneration

• Work on programmes that connect water resilience, biodiversity, and finance at landscape scale

• Join a collaborative team that values clarity, autonomy, and high-quality delivery

• Hybrid working: we value flexibility, and also getting together in the office to share ideas (and coffee)