Carbon Development Technical Director

WHO WE ARE

At Trees for the Future (TREES), we believe farmers have the power to transform the world. For over 30 years, we’ve been a global leader in agroforestry training, partnering with farming families to build vibrant economies, sustainable food systems, and thriving ecosystems. Through our signature Forest Garden Approach, a proven nature-based solution, farmers restore their land, plant thousands of trees, and grow diverse crops, breaking cycles of climate change and generational poverty. By reclaiming their agency, farmers are creating new possibilities for their families, communities, and the environment. We’ve worked all around the world and are currently active in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. TREES has planted over 400 million trees to date.

Through our agroforestry work, TREES is a project developer of high-quality nature-based solutions (NBS) carbon projects that generate verified carbon credits for the voluntary carbon market while delivering meaningful community livelihoods and biodiversity outcomes. TREES has recently validated its flagship agroforestry carbon project under Verra’s VM0042 methodology and is actively advancing its next generation of projects under VM0047.

Learn more at trees.org.

THE ROLE

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.

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