Manager, Impact First Investing

About Climate Lead

Climate Lead is a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to empowering philanthropic leaders to take immediate and far-reaching climate action. The organization operates as an impartial guide for new climate philanthropists, providing them with essential information and insights needed to drive transformative solutions in the climate space. Climate Lead distinguishes itself by cutting through the complexity of climate investing and philanthropy by curating customized roadmaps in partnership with a diverse network of climate and investment experts.

The organization serves philanthropists and investors by helping them make bold, informed impacts on climate from day one. Climate Lead’s approach combines deep subject matter expertise with strategic advisory services to connect capital with the most impactful climate solutions. The company operates with a mission-driven focus on catalytic capital and impact-first investing strategies, working across multiple practice areas including Global Climate Strategies and impact-first investing initiatives.

Climate Lead is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and maintains a hybrid work model with staff expected to work in the office Tuesday through Thursday each week. The organization is committed to building a diverse workforce and values merit, qualifications, competence, and talent in all hiring decisions.

The Manager, Impact-First Investing (IFI) leads project management, cross-functional content integration, and practice enablement as the organization develops and builds out its impact-first investing capability. This position sits at the intersection of deal coordination, investor engagement support, and team enablement, building the internal operational infrastructure for IFI while driving high-quality engagement across key accounts externally, from deals to families to fellow funders.

Working closely with the Vice President of IFI, the Manager ensures complete readiness for donor and investor engagements, tracks portfolio progress, and serves as an agile proxy to expand leadership capacity during high-priority engagements. This role acts as a vital bridge between Global Climate Strategies for deal technicals, Communications for investor-ready packaging, and the Advisory Team for toolkits, best practices, and practice enablement.

The position does not have direct managerial responsibilities for team members; however, it acts in a lead capacity to serve Advisory team leadership, owns management of strategic organizational projects, and manages relationships both internally and externally. This role is mission-critical to ensure smooth and effective completion of a wide range of activities that support the new IFI practice, which is still being shaped.

The Manager interacts across multiple teams including Advisory, Global Climate Strategies, Communications, and Operations.

• Partner directly with Global Climate Strategies to extract technical climate solution details, investment theses, and deal insights
• Collaborate with the Communications team to translate and package technical information into polished, investor-facing products, pitch decks, and reports
• Co-develop, evolve, and curate the IFI team’s toolkit, frameworks, and knowledge hub
• Ensure relationship managers know what tools, deal memos, and financial product resources are available and how to deploy them
• Capture and synthesize successful impact investing strategies across donor and investor journeys, converting lessons learned into scalable templates, guides, and workflows
• Identify collaboration opportunities across the Advisory Team and implement streamlined tools, standardized processes, and project management structures to…