Project Finance Leader

Endurance Energy; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Endurance Energy, a bold startup building modular subsea geothermal power plants, seeks a Project Finance Lead in the United States. You will originate and structure capital stacks, run financing processes, and negotiate with banks and development finance institutions through financial close.

This role reports to the COO and offers exposure to live, first-of-a-kind deals. You will own project-level financial models, pricing trajectories, and cost-of-capital analyses, collaborating with

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in structuring, raising, and closing capital for real projects or transactions.
• Backgrounds in project finance, infrastructure investing, banking, or related fields.
• Track record of leading financings to close: lender processes, term sheets, and counsel management.
• Advanced Excel modeling with auditable architecture and scenario analyses.

Responsibilities

• Own project financing end to end for every pipeline project: debt, equity, and blended capital that builds our plants.
• Build relationships with banks, private credit funds, DFIs, ECAs, and other providers, and drive lender processes to close.
• Lead negotiations of term sheets and credit agreements with lenders and investors, with outside counsel support.
• Model government instruments like grants and guarantees, and lead applications to secure them.
• Maintain project-level financial models including pricing, CAPEX, and returns.

Skills

Project finance

Financial modeling

Advanced Excel

Lender negotiations

Debt & equity

Financial close

Infrastructure finance

Communication

Tools

Excel

Job description

About Endurance

Endurance is building the world's first modular subsea geothermal power plants, converting vast thermal resources under the ocean into gigawatts of baseload power. Backed by Founders Fund, Felicis, First Round Capital, and Point72 Ventures, our founding team includes veterans from SpaceX, Helion, Blue Origin, and Apple. We have completed multiple deep-ocean deployments to subsea volcanoes and are launching a long-term demonstration project this fall. By leveraging modular design, manufacturing scale, efficient drilling, and latent cooling on the seafloor, we are pioneering a new category of energy that outperforms traditional sources on environmental impact, deployment speed, and cost.

What you'll be doing

The Project Finance Lead is in charge of financing Endurance's projects, end to end. You will raise the capital that gets our power plants built: originating and structuring capital stacks, running financing processes, and negotiating directly with banks, lenders, development finance institutions, and government partners through financial close. Behind every deal, you will build and own the project-level financial models, maintain the cost-of-capital and $ per MW/MWh trajectory that serves as the company's most-watched leading indicators, and keep the single source of truth for deal economics across the company.

This is a builder's seat with immediate live-fire work. We are in active negotiations with strategic customers, a sovereign government, and industrial partners, and each project needs a financing plan and a financier who can execute it: capital stack options, pricing scenarios, and sensitivity analyses that hold up under scrutiny, and then the lender conversations that turn those structures into committed capital. When we say go finance a project, you own it from first model to financial close.

You will report directly to the COO, transitioning to our commercial leadership as the team grows. The role offers unusual exposure for its level: you will lead financing negotiations, sit across the table from banks, lenders, and sovereign counterparties, work directly with executives and outside advisors, and see first-of-a-kind deals from first model to signature.

Key Responsibilities

• Own project financing end to end for every pipeline project: originate, structure, negotiate, and close the debt, equity, and blended capital that builds our power plants.

• Build and own relationships with banks, private credit funds, development finance institutions, export credit agencies, and other capital providers, and run lender processes from first outreach through financial close.

• Lead term sheet and financing agreement negotiations directly with lenders and investors, working with outside counsel to translate economic terms into agreement language and pressure-test the economics of draft agreements.

• Model government and development finance instruments into project capital stacks, including grants, loan guarantees, and risk-mitigation products, and lead the applications and negotiations to secure them.

• Build and own project-level financial models for every pipeline project: pricing, CAPEX, delivered cost of energy, capital stacks, and returns.

• Own and maintain the company's cost-of-capital trajectory and proforma pricing/CAPEX ($ per MW/MWh) model(s), keeping it anchored to real financing structures and market comparables.

• Support live offtake negotiations with pricing scenarios, term sheet economics, sensitivity analyses, and rapid-turn responses to counterparty positions.

• Score pipeline projects against our project evaluation framework and maintain the deal-economics source of truth used across the company.

• Build and maintain data rooms for partners, customers, and lenders, and lead responses to lender and investor due diligence.

• Support the commercial team's pipeline reporting, including agreement tracking and progress metrics.

• Develop financing and structuring strategies for new markets and new deal types as the pipeline expands.

• Be the Endurance lead on real-time economics, pricing, structures, and industry intelligence for global commercial and project finance as well as power markets, including quantitative and qualitative research into counterparty economics, markets, and background.

Qualifications

• ~7 years of experience structuring, raising, and closing capital for real projects or transactions.

• We care about what you have financed, not where you sat; backgrounds in project finance, infrastructure investing, banking, private credit, development finance, developer or IPP finance teams, energy (especially geothermal or oil and gas), or corporate development can all fit.

• Track record of leading financings to close: running lender processes, negotiating term sheets and credit agreements, and managing lenders, investment committees, and counsel through execution.

• Demonstrated experience building infrastructure-grade, auditable project financial models from a blank workbook: revenue builds, PPA pricing, capital stacks, debt service and sizing, and returns analysis, all built with full sensitivity and scenario analysis capabilities. Advanced Excel modeling skill, with clean, auditable model architecture.

• Creative financier who can integrate blended capital into traditional project finance. Familiarity if not expertise with government, multilateral, credit support, philanthropic grants, tax credit-equity, private credit, structured/asset-backed finance, and beyond.

• Strong understanding of energy or infrastructure project economics, including levelized cost concepts, offtake structures, and how cost of capital drives delivered cost.

• Experience with counterparty due diligence (e.g. offtake credit) and owning responses to external investor and lender due diligence.

• Detail-oriented and organized manager who can own transaction documentation, internal project management, and management of legal counsel, engineering, market study consultants, and other service vendors.

• Clear, direct writing suitable for term sheets, internal memos, and counterparty-facing materials including presentations and proposals.

• Excellent communication skills suitable for negotiating commercial terms with externalcounterparties and presenting business-level metrics to internal executives and Board members.

• Able to code switch, and mentor others to code switch, across asset classes (VC to project finance) and audiences (data centers to utilities to engineers to finance professionals).

• Comfort operating with ambiguity, incomplete data, and short timelines

Preferred Skills

• Exposure to first-of-a-kind or pre-bankable technology financing, where standard project finance templates do not yet apply.

• Familiarity with development finance institution instruments such as political risk insurance, partial risk guarantees, or export credit facilities.

• Prior experience with infrastructure or infra-adjacent financings and transactions outside the US market.

• Familiarity with power purchase agreements, tolling structures, capacity contracts, or colocation deal structures.

• Network with and experience working with hyperscalers, data centers, utilities, industrials, and government PPA negotiations.

• Experience supporting live negotiations or transaction execution as the analytical lead

• Experience operating in high-urgency organizations with aggressive commercial and operational schedules.

Compensation, Benefits, & Perks

As a pre-revenue startup, Endurance Energy offers competitive