Sun King

Senior Grants Manager

Posted 23 Days Ago

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Africa, IN, USA

Hybrid

Senior level

Greentech • Energy • Solar • Renewable Energy

The Role

The Senior Grants Manager oversees grant programs, ensuring compliance and strategic alignment while managing relationships with donors and coordinating with various stakeholders for effective grant delivery.

Summary Generated by Built In

Job Location: Kenya/South Africa/Nigeria
About the Role

Sun King is seeking a Senior Grant Manager to oversee and shape the growth of its expanding portfolio of results-based financing (RBF) and grant programs across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of grant compliance, commercial insight, and impact measurement.
This is not a traditional grant administration role. The successful candidate will act as a key link between Sun King’s policy, finance, and delivery teams, ensuring that grant programs meet high standards while generating insights that inform business direction.
The Senior Grant Manager will design and continuously improve Sun King’s grant management system, while also overseeing the full grant portfolio across multiple markets. The role blends strategic oversight with hands-on execution, ensuring that grants are thoughtfully selected, effectively implemented, and well integrated into the business, while maintaining strong reporting, compliance, and donor engagement practices.
This role reports to the Global Vice President for Public Policy and Government Relations and works closely with country teams, finance, legal, operations, sales, and external partners.

What you will be expected to do:

Grant Strategy and Portfolio Management

Oversee Sun King’s grant and RBF portfolio, ensuring alignment with business strategy, market priorities, and delivery capacity
Review and shape grant opportunities, providing input on strategic fit, delivery requirements, risks, and trade-offs
Ensure the portfolio remains aligned with commercial priorities as well as donor expectations
Maintain a forward-looking view of the grant pipeline to inform planning and prioritization
Identify ways grants can enable scale, reduce risk in new markets, and improve affordability
Maintain a portfolio tracking system to provide visibility on value, risk, and workload
Contribute to positioning Sun King as a reliable and delivery-focused partner for donors

Grant Lifecycle Management

Manage end-to-end grant processes, from opportunity identification through to close-out
Coordinate proposal development, ensuring submissions are high quality, realistic, and compliant
Oversee grant setup, including alignment on scope, budgets, reporting, and operational considerations
Act as the primary point of contact for donor compliance, reporting, and audit readiness

Grant Operations and Compliance

Establish and improve grant management processes, templates, and tools
Manage reporting timelines and ensure submissions are timely and accurate
Coordinate audits, verifications, and donor reviews, addressing issues as they arise
Ensure grant requirements are integrated into business operations
Act as a point of contact for compliance or delivery-related risks

Cross-functional Coordination

Work closely with country managers and program teams on grant delivery
Coordinate inputs from finance, legal, operations, and sales teams
Streamline data requests by improving standardization and aligning reporting with business KPIs
Promote clear awareness of donor requirements and grant obligations across teams

External Engagement and Partnerships

Manage relationships with donors, fund managers, and verification partners
Coordinate external consultants facilitating proposals, compliance, or audits
Represent Sun King in donor engagements related to grants and RBFs

You might be a strong candidate if you have:

7+ years of experience in grants management, results-based financing, or donor-funded programs
Experience managing complex, multi-stakeholder grants or RBF programs
Strong data management capability, with familiarity in M&E and impact measurement frameworks
Experience engaging with international donors, DFIs, or fund managers (e.g., World Bank, FCDO, GIZ/EnDev, IFC, or similar)
Practical knowledge of impact reporting and delivery requirements for credible results
Ability to operate effectively across teams in fast-paced environments
Familiarity with sector reporting frameworks such as GOGLA methodology and World Bank/ESMAP/GIZ indicators

What Sun King Offers

Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun Center for Leadership.

About
Sun King is the world’s leading off-grid solar energy company, combining cutting-edge product design, fintech, and field operations to deliver energy access for the 1.8 billion people who live without an affordable and reliable electric-grid connection.Sun King has built a new kind of energy utility: distributed, green, customer-centric, and affordable. We bring clean, reliable, decentralized energy directly into people’s lives — from solar kits that provide first-time energy access to multi-kilowatt systems that serve both off-grid users and grid-connected customers powering larger homes, schools, hospitals, farms, offices, and light manufacturing.Already, 25 million homes and businesses rely on Sun King for electricity supply and the appliances and services it enables: lighting, televisions, fans, refrigeration, and smartphones. Sun King combines energy generation, energy-efficient appliances, installation, and financing into one seamless offering. Think of it as a distributed utility, designed for wherever energy is needed and designed to scale with its users as incomes and energy needs grow.Sun King makes solar products affordable to low-income households and businesses via ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYG) purchase financing. Sun King installs solar after customers pay a small deposit. Customers then make small, manageable payments of as little as US $0.14 a day via mobile money or cash.Instead of paying for expensive, polluting, and health-damaging kerosene for lighting or diesel for power, customers unlock savings through accessing solar power and after one to two years of payments, customers own their solar equipment outright.Sun King collects payments digitally through mobile money systems and its 35,000 field agents — over 1 million payments each day. To date, Sun King has extended more than $1.4 billion in PAYG loans to customers.Sun King began by powering homes and businesses with solar systems delivered through PAYG financing. Now, we’re using the same model to make smartphones and clean cooking equipment affordable: helping households connect to the digital economy and transition from wood-based fuels to modern, sustainable alternatives.Sun King employs 3,500 full-time staff in 14 countries, with specialties spanning product design, data science, logistics, customer service, sales, software, operations, and more — all with a passion to serve off-grid families. Sun King is committed to gender diversity in the workplace. Women represent 42% of Sun King’s workforce.