He kōrero mō mātou | About Watercare
Ki te ora te wai, ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata
When the water is healthy, the land and the people are healthy
Now is an exciting time to join Watercare, we're planning to spend $14 billion over the next 10 years to ensure we can continue to support our growing city in a climate-resilient way. When you average that out, that's an investment of $3.8 million every day!
He whakamārama mō te tūranga mahi | About the role
This is a rare opportunity to help shape and influence Watercare’s most critical strategic priorities at an enterprise level.
As the Head of Strategic Projects Office, you will lead a small, high-impact function that operates as an extension of the CEO and Executive Team. You will play a pivotal role in strengthening, accelerating and de-risking the delivery of the organisation’s most important initiatives — ensuring they are aligned to strategy, appropriately prioritised, and executed with clarity and discipline.
Working at the heart of the organisation, you will:
Partner directly with the Executive Leadership Team to drive strategic planning and portfolio alignment
Lead enterprise-wide prioritisation, ensuring investment decisions reflect strategic intent, risk appetite and funding constraints
Provide independent challenge, robust decision support and clear recommendations to enable timely executive decision-making
Surface and navigate complex trade-offs, dependencies and capacity constraints across a diverse portfolio
Provide targeted assurance and intervention on critical or at-risk programmes
Build and uplift enterprise delivery capability through a pragmatic, outcomes-focused approach
This role offers a unique combination of strategy, governance, and hands-on problem solving — ideal for a leader who thrives in complexity and wants to make a meaningful, organisation-wide impact.
Ngā pūkenga e rapu nei mātou | About you
You are a highly credible and commercially astute with a proven track record of leading complex strategic programmes and influencing at the highest levels of an organisation.
You bring:
Significant experience in strategy, transformation or enterprise portfolio leadership role
Demonstrated success delivering large-scale, multi-year initiatives with measurable outcomes
Strong experience working with Executive and/or Board stakeholders, with the confidence to challenge constructively
Advanced financial literacy, with the ability to shape and assess business cases, investment decisions and benefit realisation
Beyond your experience, you are:
An enterprise thinker who can connect strategy to execution and prioritise where it matters most
A clear and structured communicator, able to simplify complexity and enable sound decision-making
Pragmatic and outcomes-driven, focused on delivering impact rather than process for its own sake
Comfortable operating with ambiguity, and skilled at identifying risk and driving early intervention
Influential and credible, with the ability to build trust quickly and lead through influence rather than formal authority
Ngā hua mōu | What's in it for you
We offer a competitive salary and staff benefits package including:
• Training and development opportunities
• Life and income protection insurance plans
• Generous parental leave
• Employee discounts at a range of large retailers
Me pēhea te tono mai | How to Apply
Come and join our team! If you are looking for an exciting career opportunity with a fantastic team then please apply online today - careers.watercare.co.nz.
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What We Do
At Watercare we’re proud to provide a lifeline service to the people of Auckland, while protecting the environment for future generations. Every day we provide the highest quality drinking water to 1.7 million Aucklanders, and take it away again once it’s been used in the sink or flushed down the loo. Without using chemicals, we treat wastewater to a very high standard and safely return it to the environment. We also plan for new and upgraded infrastructure far into the future to ensure we can meet the needs of our fast-growing city. We operate assets worth more than $9 billion – but it’s our people who are our most valuable assets. Our staff are passionate, motivated and trustworthy people who are the leaders in their fields. They’re not afraid of a challenge and are constantly looking for new ways of improving our processes and the service we offer our customers. If this sounds like you, please visit our careers centre to see our job vacancies and be notified of future opportunities: https://careers.watercare.co.nz
