Carbon Development Technical Director

Trees for the Future

2d•Remote

About The Position

The Carbon Development Technical Director will provide senior technical leadership across the full carbon project lifecycle - from feasibility through validation, verification, and issuance - while supporting TREES’ transition from VM0042 to VM0047. This role serves as a critical bridge between alignment with methodology, data, implementation, and investor expectations, ensuring technical rigor while enabling scalable, field-practical project design. The ideal candidate is an experienced, solution oriented technical leader who both advises and works with teams and consultants to ensure TREES is building the robust systems and infrastructure (to match our on the groundwork with farmers) and become a leader in Nature Based Solutions (NBS) Carbon Asset Development. The role emphasizes technical judgment, oversight, and stress-testing of analytical approaches, with a clear focus on deciding when analyses should be conducted internally versus when specialized external carbon expertise is required. This is a remote role based in the US, with preference for candidates located in the DC Metro Area, with travel to East Africa as needed.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Forestry, Natural Resources, Environmental Science, GIS or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.
Minimum 5–7 years of experience in forest or agroforestry carbon project development.
Experience developing projects using ARR and/or IFM methodologies, including baseline setting, monitoring design, uncertainty management, stratification, and growth or biomass modeling considerations. (concept through issuance strongly preferred).
Experience advising GIS and spatial analysis teams, with working knowledge of tools such as ArcGIS, QGIS, and remote sensing platforms.

Responsibilities

End-to-End Carbon Project Technical Leadership
Provide senior technical oversight across the full carbon project lifecycle, from feasibility through validation, verification and issuance, ensuring alignment with registry requirements and organizational impact objectives.
Develop and manage technical delivery roadmaps that identify analytical dependencies, data requirements, key risks, and mitigation strategies, balancing methodological rigor with field-practical implementation.
Oversee feasibility assessments, baseline scenario development, and spatial analyses to inform project scale, boundary definition, and long-term crediting viability.
Translate complex methodological requirements into operationally actionable guidance for field teams, MEL staff, and GIS analysts.
Guide, review, and stress-test consultant-led technical analyses, ensuring approaches are scientifically robust, conservative, and appropriate to project risk.
Advise on which technical components TREES should build in-house versus where specialized external carbon support is required.
GIS, Data & Analytical Advisor
Act as an expert advisor and technical reviewer of spatial and analytical outputs, with sufficient depth to challenge assumptions, identify gaps, and guide methodological improvements without directly executing analyses.
Provide technical leadership on uncertainty management, including identification of key uncertainty drivers (e.g., sampling, model, stratification, and activity data error) and prioritization of actions that meaningfully reduce overall variance.
Promote adoption of advanced geospatial analytics, automation, and AI-enabled workflows, in combination with ‘ground truthing’ to improve efficiency and enhance analytical robustness.
Carbon Quantification, Benchmarks & MRV Design
Provide technical guidance on carbon quantification design choices that materially affect credit integrity, including performance benchmarks, stratification approaches, and growth or biomass modeling assumptions.
Advise on the selection and justification of appropriate performance benchmarks or stocking indices, ensuring they are traceable to field variables, repeatable through time, and consistent across heterogeneous and mixed agroforestry systems.
Guide re-stratification approaches for highly variable agroforestry landscapes, including evaluation of structure-informed or management-informed strata that demonstrably reduce variance.
Oversee evaluation and upgrading of biomass and growth models, including benchmarking alternatives and validating model performance using available field and remote sensing data, without serving as the primary model developer.
Registry, Verification & External Engagement
Serve as a primary technical liaison with validation and verification bodies and integrating feedback from audits and verifications into updated project design and MRV strategies.
Participate in investor, partner, and stakeholder discussions as a technical subject-matter expert, translating crediting risk, uncertainty, and methodological constraints into clear, decision-relevant insights.
Support carbon credit positioning by ensuring technical claims are conservative, credible, and aligned with evolving market and integrity expectations.
Anticipate and prepare for technical scrutiny from registries, auditors, and buyers by proactively stress-testing assumptions and documentation.
Strategy, Learning & Continuous Improvement
Contribute technical expertise to broader carbon and nature-based solutions strategy, including methodology selection, portfolio construction, and scaling pathways.
Monitor emerging developments in forest and agroforestry methodologies, MRV innovation, registry guidance, and integrity frameworks, translating trends into actionable recommendations.
Support organizational learning by synthesizing and communicating technical lessons learned to program, MEL, and leadership teams.