Team Lead

Job Title: Team Lead

Project Name: SSSP

Job Type: Full-time

Location of Position: Kyiv, Ukraine, with regional travel as required

Reporting to: Project Director

Remuneration: Fees are subject to negotiation in line with market rates

Indicative LOE/Time Frame: December 2025 – March 2028 (annual contract review every March based on availability of project funding)

Probation period: 3 months

Application Deadline: 17 November 2025

Application Instructions:

Please note: Alinea International does not provide exemptions from mandatory military service requirements for consultants engaged under Private Entrepreneur (PE) contracts.

1. A cover letter is mandatory to be considered. Cover letters should effectively align your skills and experiences with the specific job responsibilities outlined in the position’s description, demonstrating your aptitude and enthusiasm for the role, your daily fee and current availability.

2. Click the “Apply Now" link to upload your cover letter and CV in English.

3. Only successful candidates will be contacted. No phone calls please.

Alinea is an international development consultancy providing technical and management expertise that helps people improve their lives. Alinea works with governments, investors, companies, and communities to create lasting change. Over 39 years, Alinea has successfully delivered more than 1,000 projects worldwide. For more information, please visit Alinea International website.

Project Description: The project supports Ukraine’s security and stabilisation efforts. It focusses on working with civilian and military actors, which are most exposed to the adverse effects of war. The project incorporates several distinct workstreams that contribute to the SSSP strategic objectives of building resilience of Ukrainian security actors and civilians in the face of the Russian aggression. Topics include procurement, mental health and psychosocial support, and security planning and delivery.

Purpose of the Role: The Team Lead (TL) manages the team and the project on a day-to-day basis. The TL supervises the work of the SSSP Delivery, RMEL, and PMU teams as well as short-term technical experts.

The TL will work hand-in-hand with the Kyiv-based Deputy Team Lead / Director of Delivery with the aim of growing and supporting a robust delivery team where the TL will gradually assume an increasingly outward-facing role responsible for building stakeholder relationships to drive SSSP strategy and positioning SSSP vis-à-vis other programmes in Ukraine, while the DTL will focus on the delivery across SSSP workstreams.

The successful candidate will lead the team and have responsibility for all programme workstreams, ensuring they contribute towards SSSP’s strategic vision, help develop and iterate this vision, manage Client and partner relationships, ensure quality of delivery, research and reporting, and work with all stakeholders to ensure the project adapts and responds to the context.

The TL fosters the culture of information hygiene and digital security, including information sharing controls, access rights, risk assessment, mitigation, and troubleshooting to maintain safeguarding, delivery, and reputational standards across SSSP. The TL will be responsible for monitoring and updating information security procedures with support from the the Cyber Specialist and other relevant experts among the team and will lead regular information security refresher sessions.

The TL will also engage with broader stakeholders to coordinate and identify opportunities to leverage SSSP’s non-ODA support and generated lessons and insights on the ground to reinforce ODA programmes funded by the UK and other donors.

Alinea is transitioning this role into a full-time Kyiv/Ukraine based position. The Team Lead will be stepping into a position on a project with a functioning team. The successful candidate will have the aptitude to integrate quickly into the project, review and understand its components and processes, build effective working relationships with existing staff members and advisors, and ensure stakeholder engagement is proportionate and targeted.

Key Responsibilities:

The Team Lead’s responsibilities will include, but not be limited to, the following core areas:

• Team management:

o Fostering an effective and supportive team culture, ensuring appropriate line management and performance management systems are in place.

o Proactively setting conditions for sharing lessons learnt across project workstreams to strengthen coherence and strategic direction of SSSP delivery.

o Serving as a risk escalation contact point to enact Alinea’s companywide adult safeguarding and whistle-blower policy to identify and address any concerns among team members regarding any misconduct or wrongdoing that puts individual well-being, project integrity, or reputation of Alinea or the client at risk. These will be treated on a case-by-case basis to ensure proportionate level of response discussed at the regular meetings with the SSSP Project Director and, where appropriate, Alinea’s Corporate Safeguarding team.

• Informing strategy: Staying abreast of stakeholder dynamics, ensuring that the programme understands and adapts to the context, and iterating strategy through working with the Client and team in response to changes in the context, lessons learned, and key stakeholder relationships.

• Ensuring delivery:

o Overseeing day-to-day delivery, procurement and coherence across the programme’s three workstreams and research and MEL components.

o Foster an internal culture and systems that ensure appropriate, effective and secure information management and communication with the client and external partners.

o Managing key stakeholder relationships, including with parallel projects, government, military, donors and CSOs, to enhance coordination and impact.

o Ensuring appropriate stakeholder engagement, risk management, and security compliance.

o Enacting project adaptability and integrating lessons gained through research and delivery.

o Ensuring the quality of delivery, reporting, and stakeholder engagement.

o Triage, resolve, or escalate, as appropriate, risks for continuous project delivery while ensuring the duty-of-care and well-being of project staff, consultants, and partners.

• Client engagement: The TL acts as the principle day-to-day liaison with the Client reporting the project’s ongoing performance, updates, risks, and developments.

• Corporate engagement and risk management: The TL will monitor and escalate risks and work closely with the Project Director to ensure effective project and risk management.

• Recruitment: The TL will work with HR, the Deputy Team Lead and others to ensure the project is appropriately staffed.

• Project learning and adaptation: In collaboration with the RMEL Director, MEL Lead, and Stabilisation Advisor, facilitate annual reflection workshops to optimise learning from experiences, develop case studies and identify trends that influence the project’s strategic objectives and means/activities to achieve it.

• Reporting quality: The TL will work with the Client and RMEL Director to ensure that reporting is actionable and relevant to need. The TL will be the final point of review and approval of project reporting (Quarterly Reports, research reports, ad hoc documents) providing quality assurance and branding compliance check before the reports are shared for final approval to the PD and submitted to the Client.

• Financial management: The TL will support any financial reporting and/or other corporate tasks, supported by SSSP Project Manager and Finance Manager, prior to the PD sign-off and submission to the Client. These include:

o Monthly financial reports: ABB budgets, budget forecasts, spend risks.

o Delivery-related documentation: Progress Reports, Procurement Support Request Forms (SRFs), Terms of References and payment schedules for consultants and delivery partners, grant agreements, service contracts, etc.

Qualifications and Experience: Requirements:

• A master’s degree or equivalent in International Relations, Conflict Studies, Security Studies, Political Science, or a related field.

• A minimum of 10 years’ experience leading complex stabilisation, security, and conflict-focussed projects in conflict and/or stabilisation contexts. Strong networks and relationships with security sector stakeholders in Ukraine and Eastern Europe are strongly desired.

• Proven experience in leading teams, including managing the project with established systems and processes, as well as modernising those to adapt to changing context and needs of the project, client, and beneficiaries.

• Experience in cohering disparate workstreams to drive strategic direction of the project. Demonstrable skills in leading projects that are iterative and highly flexible to the changing context on the ground will be considered a strong advantage.

• A strategic thinker who navigates complex security and political environments with excellent verbal and written communications skills.

• Proficiency in Ukrainian language is strongly desirable.