Programme Manager - Global Finance, Trade & Diplomacy

Our Guiding Star: Building Resilience QCF was established in 2019 by the founders of Quadrature Capital https://quadrature.ai/, Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya, out of a recognition of the persistent poverty, inequality, and human suffering that shape our societies. Our founders were already active philanthropists in these areas, and came to understand how climate would compound them, driving food insecurity, deepening displacement, and pushing the most vulnerable into crisis. This realisation led them to establish QCF with a focus on climate as the defining challenge of our time. In 2025, the founders and QCF decided to bring the Foundation's climate funding together with other private philanthropic funding streams across poverty, inequality and human suffering under an expanded Foundation remit. QCF’s updated mandate is based on our core belief: that acute human suffering now, and cascading climate risks ahead, are interconnected crises that threaten the stability of societies everywhere. This demands action both downstream, to address poverty and inequality and help people secure their lives and dignity today; and upstream, to build the conditions that make lasting climate and societal transformation possible and durable for tomorrow. This understanding frames the vision of the Foundation: “A just and resilient world, where those most affected by intersecting crises have the power to shape their own futures.” We focus on three interconnected challenges that undermine resilience. - Human security; Protecting survival and dignity in the face of acute threats, including conflict, natural disasters and climate shocks. - Poverty and inequality; Addressing persistent economic exclusion and unequal access to opportunity, by tackling the structural drivers of injustice. - Climate risk; Responding to escalating threats to lives and livelihoods from climate impacts, which will intensify without a fast, fair transition. Our purpose is to trust and resource those closest to the work to: - Secure today - securing the survival and dignity of those in conditions of acute vulnerability, through urgent poverty and humanitarian response; and - Transform tomorrow – creating the enabling conditions for a just, low-carbon and resilient future. The role QCF is looking for a Programme Manager to hold the operational spine of its Global Finance, Trade & Diplomacy (GFTD) portfolio. The portfolio starts from the premise that resilient societies depend in part on how capital is raised and allocated, how institutions shape public and private investment, and whose interests are reflected in trade and diplomatic arrangements. It brings together three overlapping fields: private markets, finance and business; public and development finance, including institutional reform; and trade and diplomacy frameworks. GFTD connects global reform to practical resilience outcomes in QCF’s priority regions and programmes. The Programme Manager is the operational lead responsible for translating the strategic direction set by the Programme Director into high-quality, compliant, and effective delivery across a complex, multi-year, multi-jurisdiction grant portfolio. Operating with significant autonomy, the Programme Manager provides the programme management leadership, systems discipline, and cross-functional coordination needed to advance the Foundation’s strategic objectives and deliver impact at scale. For GFTD specifically, this means holding delivery across an existing group of around 15–20 partnerships and an initially eight-figure, multi-year grant portfolio, while the portfolio’s mandate, architecture and pipeline are still being established. This role reports to the Programme Director, GFTD, and works as part of the GFTD pod alongside colleagues from Finance, Legal, Impact & Insights, Portfolio Operations and Communications. Key accountabilities (the WHAT) 1. Portfolio delivery and execution - Own end-to-end delivery of the portfolio as a disciplined, adaptive system, ensuring capital is deployed on time, to quality, and within risk appetite - Translate PD strategy into clear delivery plans, sequencing, stage gates, milestones, and portfolio rhythms - Maintain alignment between strategic ambition, delivery feasibility, governance requirements, and partner realities — including testing the indicative five-year scenario of 20–30 grants at roughly $3–30 million each against team capacity, partner needs and available capital. - Integrate delivery across Finance, Legal, Impact & Insights, Operations, and other organisational systems and processes - Maintain oversight of timelines, dependencies, risks, and execution across a complex, multi-year portfolio 2. Programme and project management discipline - Translate portfolio strategy into structured delivery plans (timelines, milestones, dependencies, critical paths) - Maintain and manage QCF’s central grant management system (GivingData) as the core source of truth for pipelines, due diligence, payments, reporting, and grant tracking - Support development of complementary trackers or processes where needed, ensuring alignment with organisation-wide systems, consistency, and visibility - Run clear and effective delivery processes, including structured meetings, clear actions and owners, and consistent follow-through - Produce high-quality, decision-ready materials, ensuring delivery activity is documented, organised, and auditable - Working with other relevant function leads (e.g. MDs and Head of Portfolio Operations) contribute to continuous improvement of organisation-wide systems, tools, templates, and ways of working 3. Due diligence, risk and reassurance - Lead and coordinate legal, financial, operational, and contextual due diligence processes - Translate findings into clear recommendations, trade-offs, and delivery implications for PDs - Maintain active oversight of operational and delivery risks, integrating compliance proportionately without constraining partner effectiveness - Ensures adherence to regulatory, legal, governance, and internal assurance standards 4. Insight generation and portfolio learning - Generate actionable insights from delivery, partner reporting, portfolio trends, and implementation experience to inform PD and leadership decisions - Synthesise learning into clear briefings, portfolio updates, QFR inputs, and delivery insight - Ensure reporting, learning, and delivery insight are captured systematically to strengthen portfolio adaptation and organisational learning - Support the PD in translating portfolio evidence and delivery insight into strategic reflection and decision-making, including criteria to start, continue, adapt, scale or stop commitments. 5. Partner coordination and delivery relationships - Act as the operational point of contact for partners, ensuring clarity, trust, responsiveness, and smooth delivery - Build respectful, partner-aware relationships that support partners as primary change actors - Ensure reporting, communication, and operational processes support effective partnership working - Coordinate delivery interactions across internal teams and external partners including funders, policy actors, investors and multilateral institutions in the GFTD ecosystem maintaining alignment and pace. Ways of working (the HOW) Judgement under uncertainty - Makes clear, timely decisions under uncertainty, balancing pace, risk, delivery feasibility, and partner realities - Exercises strong judgement on delivery feasibility, sequencing, and trade-offs, ensuring plans are realistic and proportionate - Identifies where delivery approaches are not viable or aligned with partner capacity, and adapts accordingly - Translates decisions into disciplined execution and consistent follow-through, maintaining pace and quality across workstreams Learning Agility - Continuously adapts delivery based on evidence, implementation learning, partner insight, and changing context - Uses delivery signals, reporting, feedback loops, and operational insight to refine systems and portfolio execution over time - Comfortable updating delivery approaches and assumptions in response to new information - Treats learning and adaptation as core disciplines within delivery leadership Humility and partner mindset · Builds credible, respectful, and trust-based relationships with partners and colleagues - Operates with humility and awareness of power dynamics in delivery relationships and grant-making processes - Works in ways that support partners rather than creating unnecessary burden or complexity - Exercises influence responsibly, supporting collaborative problem-solving and shared accountability Delivery discipline and ownership - Maintains strong programme and project management discipline across planning, tracking, coordination, documentation, and execution - Understands implementation realities, operational constraints, delivery risks, and organisational dependencies - Maintains high standards of rigour, organisation, detail, and follow-through - Ensures delivery systems, trackers, documentation, and workflows remain accurate, consistent, and audit-ready - Balances agility and responsiveness with governance, accountability, and operational discipline Clarity, synthesis and communication - Produces clear, structured, and decision-ready written and verbal communication - Synthesises delivery insight, operational complexity, and stakeholder input into actionable recommendations - Explains trade-offs, risks, dependencies, and delivery implications clearly across different audiences - Creates shared understanding and alignment across partners, PDs, and cross-functional teams Organisation-first mindset - Thinks beyond own portfolio and contributes to QCF’s wider organisational effectiveness - Works collaboratively and non-territorially across portfolios, functions, and delivery systems - Shares learning, tools, insight, and operational improvements across the organisation - Contributes to strengthening organisation-wide systems, processes, and ways of working - Supports team effectiveness, onboarding, and collective capability building What you’ll bring • Substantial and recent experience managing a live grant or programme portfolio end to end — pipeline, due diligence, contracting, payments, reporting, compliance and close-out — at a scale comparable to an eight-figure, multi-year portfolio. • Working fluency in at least one of global private markets and business reform, public and development finance, or trade and multilateral diplomacy, with enough breadth to follow the connections across all three. Depth in every field is not expected. • A strong grasp of how finance, institutions, rules and political incentives shape investment outcomes, sufficient to hold credible operational conversations with partners and to recognise when a delivery plan does not reflect institutional reality. • Proven programme and project management discipline: structured delivery planning, dependency and critical-path management, and accurate, audit-ready systems and documentation as a matter of routine. • Experience coordinating legal, financial and operational due diligence in a multi-jurisdiction context, and translating findings into clear recommendations and trade-offs for senior decision-makers. • Excellent written and verbal communication, with a track record of producing concise, decision-ready material for executive, board or Trustee audiences. • Experience working cross-functionally in a growing organisation, and contributing to shared systems, tools and ways of working rather than building in isolation. • A low-ego, partner-first approach, sound judgement about power and influence in grant-making, and commitment to QCF’s mission and to the agency of those most affected by intersecting crises.