Team Lead, Projects

Rippleworks Foundation believes all people should have equitable access to the resources and opportunities to live life to the fullest. Our mission is to provide the practical support entrepreneurs and their teams need to scale faster and improve more lives. Rippleworks’ programs have directly supported 260 ventures by running 400 custom advisory projects across 60 countries, running workshops for over 1,600+ leaders and deploying more than over $270 million in unrestricted funding to help these ventures grow. 

We are a mission-driven team dedicated to helping impactful ventures thrive. Our goal is to create the best possible workplace for purpose-driven professionals to make an outsized difference in the world—learning, growing, and having fun together along the way.

Rippleworks has been named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies (by Fast Company) and one of the world’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (by Fast Company and Accenture)

We support our portfolio of Ventures in 4 ways:

Projects: Short-term, high-impact projects where social ventures work with leading executives to tackle top operational priorities

Expert Office Hours: Specialized, contextually relevant advice for ventures from Rippleworks Experts

Leaders Studio: Expert-led learning programs where leaders gain critical skills ventures need to deliver impact at scale.

Capital: Provides hard-to-find capital required for scale (grants and loans)

We are an equal opportunity employer and committed to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion at Rippleworks. Rippleworks is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. Rippleworks also complies with federal and state disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please email [email protected].

Hiring Key Dates:

- Applications Open: October 6, 2025

- Applications Closed: October 17, 2025

- Interviews occurring: October 20 - November 14, 2025

You will lead the next phase of Rippleworks’ Projects program—building on a strong foundation to create a more flexible, customized approach that accelerates ventures’ growth. This role combines strategy and execution: refining our approach to better meet ventures’ needs while maintaining exceptional customer experience, guiding and growing the Projects Team, and ensuring our work is deeply practical, venture-centered, and aligned with Rippleworks’ broader impact goals. You’ll balance honoring a decade of proven practices with innovating for what ventures need today.

Specifically, you will:

• Evolve Projects delivery: Build on the existing Projects foundation to create flexible, venture-tailored approaches meet ventures' unique needs with right-sized support.
• Design practical tools: Develop templates, frameworks, and processes that help the team work efficiently. Reimagine travel to ventures as a strategic tool to increase impact.
• Ensure venture outcomes: Make sure Projects not only meet milestones but strengthen ventures’ capabilities, connecting them to additional support when needed.
• Lead and inspire the Projects team: Manage 4–6 Venture Growth Managers, fostering clarity, accountability, and a culture of ownership and focused innovation and learning.
• Coach and grow talent: Build Venture Growth Managers’ core competencies, provide feedback, and create realistic career pathways, including onboarding, skill growth, and transitions to roles inside or outside Rippleworks.
• Optimize team capacity: Track and plan Venture Growth Managers’ availability to ensure the right people are deployed for maximum impact, maintaining 90%+ utilization.
• Steward data and resources: Oversee dashboards to inform decisions, ensure timely data entry, and manage budgets responsibly.
• Collaborate across teams and departments: Serve as a Department leader, partner cross-functionally to share learnings, remove blockers, make tradeoffs, and align Projects with Rippleworks’ goals. Contribute to annual planning at the department and team level.
• Maintain first-hand experience: Deliver 2–3 Projects annually to stay connected to the program and model excellence.

About You

You see challenges as yours to solve. You bring fresh perspectives and are motivated to help evolve Projects into an adaptive, knowledge-driven, and consistently impactful model.

Competencies for this role: 

• Business Insight: Applies knowledge of social ventures and the broader ecosystem to advance Rippleworks' goals. Applies understanding of business drivers and needs.
• Decision Quality: Is a strong critical thinker and makes good and timely decisions that keep Rippleworks moving forward. Able to walk someone else through their thought process in a clear and concise way.
• Plans and Aligns: Plans and prioritizes work to meet commitments aligned with goals.
• Effective Communication: Developing and delivering appropriate communications, conveying a clear understanding of the needs of different audiences.

Core competencies for all Rippleworks people managers

• Priority Setting: Focuses themselves and others on what matters most, makes timely decisions, communicates the “why,” and removes obstacles to ensure progress.
• Cultivates Teams: Creates an inclusive, psychologically safe team culture. Builds trust, encourages diverse perspectives, and celebrates achievements.
• Develops Others: Asks purposeful questions and provides direct feedback to help individuals reach defined milestones and develop necessary skills.

Core competencies for all Rippleworks employees

• Ventures First: Deeply understands venture needs in order to design and deliver exceptional value to our venture partners through the experts who support them. 
• Learn Forward: Continuously and actively learns through experimentation when tackling new problems, using both successes and failures as growth opportunities.
• Connect with Care: Engages our global community with curiosity and kindness across roles and levels, backgrounds, and geographies to cultivate trust, inclusivity, belonging, and collaborative success rooted in both empathy and fairness.
• Progress over Perfection: Navigates dynamic, changing situations and makes decisions or creates a path forward even with imperfect or incomplete information
• Be an Owner: Reliably executes and takes initiative to deliver high-quality work and impact with care and tenacity. Evolves solutions that best serve ventures, Rippleworks, and the broader team. 

Qualifications

• Program Leadership: 8+ years managing programs, projects, or teams in impact-driven organizations, consulting, or organizational growth contexts.
• Team Management: Proven experience leading and developing teams of 4–10 direct reports, including cultivating learning, driving performance management, and supporting career development.
• Venture or Client-Facing Experience: Comfortable working directly with external partners or organizations to deliver tailored solutions with measurable impact.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Experience working across departments or functions to align priorities, manage tradeoffs, and drive shared outcomes.
• Data-Driven Approach: Comfortable using dashboards, metrics, and systems to inform decisions, track progress, and measure impact.

• Competitive Compensation & Benefits: Earn a salary of $196,000 with robust benefits, including medical, dental, vision, life, 401(k) + employer match, holidays, flexible PTO, wellness, and remote-work stipends. While Rippleworks has one global salary structure, the salary listed here reflects employees on US payroll. To keep total rewards equitable across countries, salaries may be adjusted if hiring in a country where employer-paid compulsory benefits are significantly more robust and costly than in the US. 
• Global Engagement: Travel opportunities to connect with the social impact ecosystem and experience Rippleworks' impact firsthand. Extend work trips through our Study Abroad Program for regional exploration.
• Giving Back: Participate in our Community Grants program, awarding $50K to a nonprofit of your choice, plus a $2,500 charitable donation match for financial or volunteer contributions.
• Growth-Oriented Culture: Access professional coaching, a generous learning budget, and regular team learning events to support personal and professional development.
• Flexible Remote-First Environment: Enjoy flexible work hours, remote-first stipends, and meaningful virtual and in-person connections through Core Collaboration Weeks (2–3 times per year).
• Sabbatical Benefit: After five years, take four weeks off for rest, travel, or personal exploration to refresh and re energize.