Environmental Planning Director

Job Summary

WRA is an employee-owned environmental consultancy. We are a tenacious team of planners, engineers, and scientists, and we aim to leave the lands we love better than we found them. 

Our clients and partners hire us because we’re skilled at navigating through challenging projects involving wildlands, parks, community spaces, and associated infrastructure. We bring over four decades of expertise, long-standing relationships, and connections to our local communities to make sure that projects are pursued in responsible ways where both people and the environment thrive. 

As an organization, we believe that independence and interdependence are not mutually exclusive. We invest in systems, processes, and employee programs to support our staff’s collective engagement and success. At the same time, we encourage our employees to operate with an ownership mindset, taking responsibility for outcomes and being true to our commitments.    We are looking for an ambitious, seasoned professional to provide strategic leadership and oversight of our Environmental Planning team. This person will grow and diversify our client base and seek out new opportunities to expand our planning practice. You will work directly with the company’s leadership team to develop and implement a strategy to grow the team in both scale and services. In addition, you will have the freedom to leverage your qualifications and those of the organization to develop business in areas of your own personal interest.  An important role for this position is serving as a mentor to our staff as they develop their technical expertise and leadership skills. 

In this role, you will have several areas of impact: (1) CEQA team supervision and management (20%) (2) Principle-level technical expertise on environmental planning projects (60%) (3) Business development (20%)

Your responsibilities will include:

• Leading strategic initiatives to expand and diversify WRA’s environmental planning practices, participating in and sometimes leading company-wide strategic initiatives
• Taking ownership and driving the success of the environmental planning team’s financial performance and achievement of goals
• Mentoring the environmental team’s members and providing oversight of work products that include CEQA and NEPA documents

To be successful you will need:

• A Bachelor’s degree with major course work in environmental, urban, infrastructure, or public access planning, geography, public policy, or a related interdisciplinary field.
• A minimum of ten years of experience in preparing CEQA and NEPA documents.
• Five years of experience leading a team while targeting, procuring, and retaining clients.
• Comprehensive knowledge of project management, financial management, business development, staff development, and environmental consulting industry best practices.
• Demonstrated experience as an effective team leader and communicator who proactively ensures team issues are addressed, and who provides mentoring and coaching to foster best practices, increase staff engagement within the team and with other teams.
• Demonstrated commitment to creating a collaborative and supportive team environment that is inclusive of everyone.
• Demonstrated experience winning and working on a variety of projects including environmental planning and review, land use and community planning, infrastructure planning, and/or resiliency/sustainability. Through your work, you have developed a strong professional network of clients and teaming partners and gained experience in solving complex interdisciplinary issues on high complexity/high visibility, multi-region or multi-practice projects in multiple locations throughout California.