Project Manager / Associate Climate Lead

About the role:

Our client is looking for a mission-driven Associate Climate Lead to support and drive their Climate Action portfolio while contributing to project management and coordination across key organizational initiatives. A major focus of this role will be managing, scaling, and communicating their core data platform which is about Disaster Risk Reduction, across partner states.

The role requires someone who can bridge:

• Climate action, resilience, and public-interest programming
• Active government deployment and navigating bureaucratic leadership
• Ecosystem partnerships, grant management, and portfolio growth
• Project management and multi-stakeholder coordination across technical and non-technical teams

Roles & Responsibilities

Climate Action Leadership & Partnerships

• Programme Strategy & Execution: Support the overall design, development, and execution of high-quality programmes and initiatives, ensuring alignment with organization's overarching mission.
• The "Tech-Translator" Anchor: Serve as a key product evangelist for organization's flagship data infrastructure. Confidently deliver product demos and explain complex civic-tech/AI solutions to stakeholders (like government heads or funding partners) who have absolutely zero technical background.
• Dual-Level Stakeholder Management: Build and maintain strategic partnerships across senior government officials (IAS officers, Principal Secretaries), development/philanthropic partners (e.g., the Gates Foundation), academia, and civil society organizations (CSOs).
• Bilingual Communication: Masterfully pivot your communication style to fit your room. You must be equally comfortable presenting high-level policy or data insights to institutional leaders in the morning, and guiding on-the-ground, local CSO teams on implementation metrics in the afternoon.
• Ecosystem Tracking & Representation: Represent the organization at key regional, national, and international climate, resilience, and sustainability forums. Actively track major climate-tech and resilience events to strategically position the organization's public-interest data work.
• Portfolio Expansion & Grant Hunting: Proactively identify new strategic avenues for collaboration, proposal writing, grant acquisition, and funding pipelines to ensure sustainable portfolio growth.
• Team Mentorship & Growth: While starting as an individual contributor, actively prepare to manage, mentor, and absorb a future pod of 3 to 5 junior team members as the portfolio expands.

Project Management & On-Ground Coordination

• Multidisciplinary Operational Glue: Lead the day-to-day planning, execution, and monitoring of multi-stakeholder climate and cross-cutting projects. Coordinate effortlessly across specialized internal silos, spanning data scientists, tech developers, policy researchers, and visual designers.
• Structuring the Chaos: Work to build out and mature internal operational structures, ensuring tight documentation, robust risk-tracking logs, sharp feedback loops, and streamlined paperwork.
• Multi-State Portfolio Coordination: Manage the complex delivery schedules of a newly signed three-year project commitment. Balance ongoing work in established states (Assam, Odisha) while actively coordinating with upcoming State Leads to expand the model into Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.
• Deliverable & Risk Tracking: Closely monitor project timelines, track partner commitments, anticipate bottleneck risks, and facilitate transparent, swift communication across external partners and internal delivery teams.

Ecosystem & Institutional Development

• Strategic Portfolio Growth: Contribute directly to the macro-level strategic planning and development of the organization's climate action and data-for-good portfolio.
• Rebuilding Institutional Buy-In: Step in with the grit and strategy required to rebuild institutional trust and secure fresh buy-in from scratch with administrative leadership.
• Deeply Embedded Government Delivery: Be willing to travel to partner states and physically embed yourself inside government departments when critical policy or platform deployment windows require close, collaborative co-writing.
• Strategic Proposal Development: Contribute heavily to partnership strategies, institutional engagement plans, and technical/financial proposal writing to win public-sector buy-in and institutional mandates.

Required Skills & Qualifications 

• 5–8+ years of relevant professional experience in climate action, public policy, sustainability, development, resilience, partnerships, programme management, or related domains.
• Demonstrated experience engaging with government departments, development partners, academic institutions, civil society organisations, and other ecosystem stakeholders.
• Experience managing multi-stakeholder projects and programmes, including planning, coordination, implementation, and stakeholder management.
• Strong partnership-building and relationship management skills, with the ability to identify and develop strategic collaboration opportunities.
• Exposure to one or more domains such as climate action, climate resilience, climate finance, disaster risk reduction (DRR), public policy, governance, data and AI for public good, or related sectors.
• Strong interpersonal, communication, and facilitation skills, including the ability to engage effectively with senior government officials and institutional leaders.
• Ability to work collaboratively across multidisciplinary teams spanning research, policy, data, technology, design, and implementation.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and translate emerging opportunities into actionable initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to work in dynamic and evolving environments while balancing multiple priorities and stakeholder expectations.
• Willingness to travel to partner states and project locations as required.
• Comfort or experience working alongside technical teams; an active curiosity about Open Data, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), or Responsible AI.