Director, Water Supply Resilience
The Director, Water Supply Resilience provides leadership, strategy, guidance, coordination, and oversight for building a new functional area with a goal to develop full redundancy and resilience of water supply. The incumbent will support planning, organizing, and implementation of policies, directives, and procedures to advance the long-term goal of water supply resilience and redundancy within DC Water’s operations, and communicates those initiatives to senior leadership, the DC Water Board of Directors, customers, and stakeholders. The incumbent will work closely with strategy and performance, engineering and operations, finance and procurement, legal and government affairs, communications, and public outreach staff to strategize the roll out of the new initiative, engage regulators, researchers, and local stakeholders to build evidence-based consensus on a long-term water supply resilience strategy and implementation approach.
| Essential Duties & Responsibilities: |
- Develops an evidence-based strategy to identify feasible options for water supply resilience and redundancy incorporating potable and non-potable water reuse, conservation, efficiency, and other novel approaches, including resource and sustainability weights for each option to streamline decision-making.
- Leads and manages a coherent, enterprise-wide water supply resilience and redundancy program by coordinating operations, planning, research, and innovations across staff and contractors. Works closely with the Authority's leadership, departments, and activities to facilitate communication and to ensure the implementation of stated objectives in a timely and efficient manner.
- Leads the development and execution of a water reuse demonstration project in close collaboration with Engineering.
- Provides recommendations and direction relating to the development of DC Water’s skill capability and additional financial resources required to mature the water supply resilience and redundancy function.
- Expert advisor to the VP Strategy & Performance and Senior Executive Leadership Team with responsibility for providing significant recommendations and analysis regarding operational updates and new infrastructure investment required to implement a water supply resilience initiative. Options will be assessed on their impact on utility-wide operations, finances, and cross-cutting sustainability initiatives.
- Leverages innovative approaches and research teams and consortiums to advance required knowledge development to measure the effectiveness and safety of the novel approaches ultimately implemented at DC Water to gather evidence for regulatory approval and to build on the work of other utilities addressing similar approaches.
- Supports the public outreach, communications, and branding team in marketing the new water supply resilience initiative to the public, ratepayers, regulators, and other stakeholders.
- Engages and builds relationships with regulators and stakeholders and identifies the innovative path forward to safely implement approaches with required approvals from the regulators.
- As necessary, supports the wastewater collection and pretreatment functions to improve operations with a newer goal of minimizing influx of industrial contamination within the wastewater stream and protecting the “sewer shed” source water for potential municipal water reuse.
- Interfaces closely with DC Water’s established strategic management and sustainability initiatives to ensure alignment with the new, long-term water supply resilience and redundancy initiative.
- Performs other duties, special assignments and special projects as assigned at the discretion of the VP Strategy & Performance.
Supervisory Responsibilities: Provides daily planning and administration to subordinates as applicable and is responsible for the selection, assignment, supervision, promotion, discipline, and training of personnel within the business unit’s functional area.
Key Working Relationships: Interacts with executive staff members and program managers of the Authority, top executives from other jurisdictions, the Board of Directors, and key officials from public and private organizations and agencies, the media, and the general public.
| Skills & Qualifications: |
The qualifications listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and ability necessary for an
individual to perform each essential responsibility satisfactorily. Reasonable amounts of training are
provided.
Required Skills & Qualifications
| Required Experience: |
| Ten (10+) years of progressive experience in water resource management, infrastructure program implementation, including five (5) years of demonstrated supervisory/managerial experience. |
| Minimum Education Requirements: |
| Bachelor's degree in Environmental Engineering, Environmental Science, Policy or related field from an accredited college or university |
| Required Skills: |
| Program Development and Implementation for Infrastructure Investment |
| Water Supply Resilience |
| One Water / Integrated Water Management |
| Cross-functional Leadership |
| Exceptional written and verbal communication skills |
| Stakeholder Management |
| Sustainability |
| Program Management |
| Strategy |
| Required Licenses & Certifications: |
| None |
| Required Languages: |
| English |
| Physical Requirements: |
| General office conditions |
| Occasionally subject to outdoor environmental conditions that include exposure to water, wind, sleet, and snow along with water utility infrastructure. |
Preferred Skills & Qualifications
| Preferred Experience: | |
| Working with federal, state and local regulatory agencies | |
| Familiar with strategies, processes, and technologies to advance water reuse programs | |
| Preferred Education Requirements: | |
| A Masters or Doctoral degree in Environmental Engineering, Environmental Science, Policy or related field with a focus on water resource management and water supply. | |
| Preferred Skills: | |
| None | |
| Preferred Licenses & Certifications: | |
| Professional Engineering (P.E.) license |
*The work environment characteristics described in the physical requirements section of the required skills & qualifications table are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential responsibilities.
| Your Experience at DC Water: |
At DC Water, our people make us an industry leader. Join a group of thinkers, innovators, and problem solvers focused on protecting life’s most precious resource in the nation’s capital.
- Take pride in your work. We provide an essential service and do work that matters. A career at DC Water is an exciting opportunity to help improve the environment and make a lasting difference for the community.
- Connect to a strong culture. Everything we do is grounded in our shared values—accountability, trust, teamwork, customer focus, safety, and wellbeing.
- Be your true self. We are an inclusive organization that embraces diversity, and we recognize and celebrate employees’ individuality and unique contributions.
- Build your skills and career path. We are committed to developing a future-ready workforce by helping our employees develop skills for the jobs of tomorrow.
We are proud to be an EEO/AA employer M/F/D/V.
We maintain a drug-free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing
The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against “qualified individuals with disabilities”.
If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to
perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please
email complianceada@dcwater.com.