Regulatory Permitting Specialist

WRA’s an employee-owned environmental consultancy. We are a tenacious team of planners, engineers, and scientists, and we aim to leave the lands we love better than we found them. 

Our clients and partners hire us because we’re skilled at navigating through challenging projects involving wildlands, parks, community spaces, and housing developments. We bring over four decades of expertise, long-standing relationships, and connections to our local communities to make sure that projects are pursued in responsible ways where both people and the environment thrive. 

As an organization, we believe that independence and interdependence are not mutually exclusive. We invest in systems, processes, and employee programs to support our staff’s collective engagement and success. At the same time, we encourage our employees to operate with an ownership mindset, taking responsibility for outcomes and being true to our commitments. 

Hope Kingma is a Director and Project Delivery Team Leader, based out of our Emeryville office, who is seeking a mid-level project manager to help her lead and develop a team of biologists and regulatory permitting specialists as we work together to support our clients with their environmental permitting and compliance needs. Hope’s team currently works on restoration and mitigation projects, open space and trail projects, and residential and commercial development projects around the greater Bay Area and Central Valley. Our clients include park districts, landscape architects, planning departments, mining companies, land use attorneys, land developers, and private property owners. 

In this role you will have 3 major areas of impact:

• Client support
• Professional development
• Mentorship and Supervision

This role will need to be within commuting distance to one of our 3 Northern California offices (San Rafael, Petaluma, and Emeryville), as periodic site visits will be necessary. 

Your responsibilities will include: 

• Manage small to large projects and proposal efforts;
• Manage and supervising two or more biologists;
• Managing and overseeing the work of sub-consultants;
• Supporting your team leader with staff development and team activities;

To be successful in this role, you will need: 

• Demonstrated experience in successfully leading aquatic resources and endangered species permitting and mitigation efforts
• Competency in managing and executing biological site assessments and other environmental constraints analyses
• Competency in managing the work products needed to support regulatory permit applications, CEQA documents, and environmental due diligence investigations (e.g., wetland delineations, rare plant surveys, habitat assessments, biological resources technical reports)
• Basic knowledge of how and when the California Environmental Quality Act applies to each project, and demonstrated experience managing and working with CEQA experts
• High quality writing and editing skills
• Experience in managing and mentoring, or a strong desire to manage and mentor junior project managers and entry-level technical staff
• A willingness to manage projects and clients handed over to you by others at WRA.
• A Bachelor’s degree in a related technical field is required, Master’s degree preferred

Other experience you may have that we would welcome on our team includes, but is not limited to:

• Wetland delineation skills
• Strong botanical skills (rare plant surveys)
• Stream and riparian habitat restoration (knowledge of the planning and permitting processes, appropriate species, and implementation/monitoring plans)
• Tidal marsh ecology
• Coastal Zone and Bay shoreline permitting
• Compliance reporting
• Invasive plant species management

WRA has an established internal leveling system for our staff that maps to salary bands that have been informed by market data. Our leveling system is dependent on years of relevant industry experience, education, and the level of responsibility and autonomy at which you’re expected to operate.

The salary range for this position is $81,000 – $117,000, which represents 2 job levels that WRA is open to considering for this role. In your first conversation with our recruiter, we will discuss leveling and compensation with you to make sure that expectations are aligned. 

Who are we?

WRA’s company vision is “cultivating a sustainable future where people and the environment thrive” and that starts with our staff. We are committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environment, and we have developed flexible policies, internal practices, and are investing in programs that prioritize learning and sustainability. We aim to create conditions that allow employees to prioritize their families, lead healthy and balanced lives, and to bring their authentic selves to work every day. We believe that by creating an exceptional workplace, our employees will be able to do their best work and be able to meaningfully contribute to the sustainability of the environment and the communities in which we live.

WRA is an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to creating a diverse environment. We recruit, employ, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law.