Circular Systems Portfolio Lead

Circular Systems Growth Portfolio Lead

Department: Circ. & Value Chain Trans. :
Advisory

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Netherlands

We're looking for a leader who understands where circular systems are heading and wants the platform to shape what comes next. This isn't a role focused on producing strategies alone. You'll help clients design pilots, prove commercial value, build infrastructure, unlock investment and scale solutions that work.

You’ll set the direction for a global practice, grow a significant business, and help some of the world's leading organisations turn circularity into a value system. Anthesis is a platform to multiply your impact.

We're looking for a builder. Someone who has spent their career in the engine room of the circular economy — working on waste systems, material loops, resource recovery, the criticality/circularity nexus, food waste reduction and valorization, reverse supply chains, urban mining, critical minerals, secondary material markets, circular business models and infrastructure — and is ready to build a global practice around it.

You’ll take ownership of a portfolio that already has real scale, real clients, and a market that's accelerating. Your job is to set the direction, grow the business, and make Anthesis the firm that defines what's next in circular systems — not just advising, but designing pilots, deploying cutting‑edge technologies, proving the economics and the investment case, and helping clients scale what works.

If you're the kind of person who looks at a broken material flow and sees untapped value — who gets excited by critical minerals recovery, robotic disassembly, and AI‑powered sorting — and then actually builds the pilot, proves the ROI, and scales it — keep reading.

Circular systems are undergoing a structural shift. The focus is moving beyond waste diversion as a sustainability goal, toward critical minerals recovery, reverse supply chains, secondary material markets, and value optimisation — driven by geopolitical risk, policy acceleration, and corporate demand for resilient supply. Recovery technologies are moving from pilot to deployment and circularity is becoming a cornerstone of smart industrial strategy.

Our clients — across consumer goods, manufacturing, built environment, food, retail, tech, and public sector — are trying to navigate this shift. Some need deep technical guidance, some need strategy, and others need execution. Increasingly, they need all three.

We’ve built strong foundations. Now we need a leader to scale this into a defining global practice — someone who understands circular systems and the full reverse value chain and can translate that into commercial growth and client impact.

This role spans several dimensions. You'll be stronger in some than others, but you should have the appetite and the capability to lead across all of them:

• Set the vision, own the strategy. Craft a compelling, forward‑looking global vision for circular systems and resource recovery that spans the full reverse value chain — grounded in where clients are heading, where policy is moving, where technology is maturing, and where Anthesis can lead. Define what winning looks like: which solutions, technologies, and partnerships to scale, which to incubate, which to evolve — and rally the organisation behind it.
  
  Translate that into a multi‑year growth plan with clear milestones, investment priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Navigate the landscape. Maintain a deep, continuously updated understanding of the geopolitical, regulatory, and market forces shaping circular systems across geographies — and how those converging forces are reshaping what circular systems need to deliver. Translate that complexity into clear, actionable strategic options, bring in the right teams to quantify the impact, and lay out the path forward for clients' operations.
• Know our client's world. Build a deep, ongoing understanding of what your clients are facing across sectors — infrastructure constraints, material economics, operational complexity, cost pressures — and the commercial opportunities that…