Water Sector Operations Director

APEM; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A growing environmental consultancy in the United Kingdom is seeking an Operations Director to drive commercial performance and operational excellence. This pivotal role involves setting frameworks, managing resources, and ensuring oversight across dispersed teams in the water sector. The ideal candidate has significant experience in consultancy settings, strong operational leadership, and excellent stakeholder management skills. This opportunity promises a role with scale and purpose in a high-growth environment.

Qualifications

• Significant senior operational leadership experience, especially in consultancy.
• A strong track record in owning P&L-linked KPIs and influencing financial performance.
• Experience in embedding operational governance frameworks across teams.

Responsibilities

• Drive commercial health by designing KPIs and improving forecast accuracy.
• Partner with teams to ensure capacity and competency for delivering projects.
• Shape expectations and embed governance rhythms across the sector.

Skills

Operational leadership experience

Commercial and financial acumen

Stakeholder management skills

Resourcing and workforce planning

Technical understanding of water sector

Education

Post-graduate qualification or chartership

Job description

About The Role

Are you a commercially minded senior leader who knows how to turn a P&L into meaningful action? Do you excel at creating KPIs that drive performance, not just measure it? Are you at your best in consulting environments where teams are distributed, delivery is complex, and operational governance really matters?

APEM’s Water Sector is entering an exciting next phase of growth, investment and transformation — and we’re looking for an Operations Director to help shape that journey. This is a pivotal senior leadership role, sitting at the heart of one of the most dynamic, environmentally impactful sectors in the business. You’ll be joining a high-growth consultancy working on freshwater, estuarine and coastal challenges at a time when investment in water resilience, climate adaptation and sustainable infrastructure is at unprecedented levels.

You’ll work alongside the Water Sector Director and Divisional Directors to build a high-performing, commercially strong and operationally excellent sector. You’ll have the mandate to set frameworks, shape expectations and embed governance rhythms that give you real oversight of how the sector operates. A critical part of the role is driving commercial health — designing KPIs that matter, improving forecast accuracy, embedding early-warning systems, and ensuring teams understand how their decisions affect financial outcomes.

Equally important is resourcing and talent planning. You’ll help determine when we hire, when we develop, when we train and how we structure our workforce to deliver complex, high-profile programmes. You’ll partner with People, Finance and senior technical leaders to ensure our teams have the capacity, competency and confidence to deliver outstanding work for clients.

This role is ideal for someone with strong operational leadership experience in consultancy settings, especially where teams are dispersed, projects are technical and delivery relies on the right people being in the right place at the right time. Environmental or water-sector experience is helpful, but operational excellence, commercial acumen and stakeholder credibility are paramount.

You’ll need to bring:

• Significant senior operational leadership experience in consultancy or professional services
• Strong commercial and financial acumen, including owning P&L-linked KPIs, driving forecast accuracy and influencing financial performance
• Experience building and embedding operational governance frameworks across multiple teams
• A track record of resourcing and workforce planning (perm, FTC and subcontractor mix)
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, including working with director-level peers and presenting at senior leadership level
• Experience working across a geographically dispersed, field-based or technical workforce
• Ability to influence, shape and challenge leaders to drive improvement
• Technical understanding of the water sector (freshwater/estuarine advantageous)

It’s a bonus if you have:

• Knowledge of the water market
• Experience leading operational integration following acquisitions
• Knowledge of ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001
• Experience working with central Finance, People, Legal or HSE functions on governance and compliance
• Prior involvement in scaling teams or building new operational structures
• Post-graduate qualification or chartership

At APEM, you’ll join a high-growth, mission-driven consultancy working to improve environmental and social outcomes worldwide. You’ll operate with genuine autonomy, collaborating across the Group to influence how we deliver, grow and lead the Water Sector into its next evolution. If you’re looking for a role with scale, challenge, visibility and purpose — this is it.

If this sounds like your next leadership step, we’d love to hear from you.

Next steps

We are focused on creating a diverse and inclusive team. If you can’t tick every box on our job description, then we are still keen to hear from you and are open to supporting your development. That may be working part time or supporting you to gain experience in a specific area – we are a growing company and are able to adapt roles to reflect individual skills.

If you think you have what it takes to join our fast-growing business, then please apply immediately on our website. All we need some basic information and your CV, we will review all applications quickly and will respond to all applications.

About Us

The APEM Group is a global environmental consultancy, we work with a range of clients including large corporations and governments to help them understand and solve a wide variety of environmental projects in the UK and globally. Our successful pioneering work has enabled us to grow and combine forces with other businesses who share our ethos and integrity. At our core, our people are working towards the protection of the environment across the globe.