About Us

In a context of climate breakdown and increasing social polarisation, Dark Matter Labs focuses on accelerating societal transition towards a more caring, equitable and regenerative future. Our daily work ranges from policy and regulation to finance and data, from governance and democratic participation to organisational culture and identity. You can think of it as the boring revolution or working to build the foundational layer for the transition.

We organise our work around what this transition needs, and the things we want to see in the world. To keep that transparent, we undertake open work in collaborative partnerships to provoke alternative visions of the future, designing how they might look in practice, and experimenting in context to reveal how they could work and enable the necessary change. More about us here.

About this Role

DM currently has a growing number of relationships and opportunities in the Netherlands around key domains of our work including climate neutral cities transition, circular economy and finance innovation mission. This is therefore a pivotal role in the DM team, essential for building and maintaining strategic relationships in the Netherlands while also supporting the smooth operations and management of influential projects like CircuLaw, alongside stewarding emerging collaborations with cities and other partners.

This role involves translating strategic goals into clear, persuasive writing, including medium term plans, research objectives and budgets, within funding proposals for diverse audiences. Experience in national or European-level bid writing is a plus, as the position contributes to collaborative business and partnership development. Responsibilities include creating well-researched content to articulate our value proposition, strategy, vision, and mission, always liaising across the team to source ideas and inputs, as well as funder relationship holding and reporting on progress.

The ideal candidate will serve as a bridge between Dark Matter Labs’ diverse portfolio of work and Netherlands-based stakeholders, connecting ideas, opportunities and practical implementation. 

Main Aspects:

• Strategic Project Execution: support development and delivery of the CircuLaw project, ensuring its thriving as a project, and alignment with DM's overall objectives.

• Relationship Management: develop and nurture DM relationships in the Netherlands, around key work streams like urban climate transition, low carbon built environment, policy & regulatory innovation, and finance innovation

• Opportunity Development: Harness new opportunities that resonate with DM's mission and vision in the Netherlands.

Time Allocation:

• 30% Project management for CircuLaw and related endeavors

• 30% Relationship management and new projects development

• 25% Operational tasks around project delivery, including finance, capacity, and administration

• 15% Strategy development and planning

We expect that the balance between these areas will regularly shift and rebalance, and will be tailored somewhat to your interest, knowledge and skills. The work has a strong focus on practical execution; it also encompasses process design, strategic thinking, new project development, internal reflection and team communication.

You might thrive in this role if:

• You possess functional knowledge of Dutch government structures, policy, & regulation: not just theory, you understand the practical intricacies of how municipalities function and can dive deep into local policy innovation processes.

• Whether it's writing funding bids, reviewing contracts, strategic planning, or managing projects, you've got the knack for making things run smoothly.

• You're comfortable with complexity; your intellectual agility enables you to make sense of intricate scenarios.

• You are not afraid of big ideas (and are confident discussing them) but also enjoy thinking more practically about how they could be implemented.

• You're a great communicator and enjoy engaging with many different people. You can understand or learn different types of decision-making processes and how they'd apply to different circumstances.

• You have high emotional intelligence and can inspect and interrogate relationships and power dynamics and notice how you work within them. You are interested to work on how you show up and your own personal development around this.

• You're a quick and flexible learner, happy and willing to throw yourself into new things and to work them out as you go.

• You're interested in The Boring Revolution, and excited by creating the small gradual building blocks towards a bold future.

• You are a completer-finisher details orientated polymath who sees things through to completion.

• You are highly conscientious and see each action you take as a building block to a much bigger impact, taking care and attention to detail in all of the micro actions.

• You're a super quick learner, happy and willing to throw yourself into new things and to work them out as you go.

• You have a thirst and appetite for undiscovered work and building what doesn't exist yet.

• You're looking to join an organisation that can deeply challenge and stimulate your thinking.

We are aware that this is an ambitious list and that you might not check all the items on it, but please still apply if you recognise yourself in a majority of them. It’s likely that we will be hiring more than one person for our work in The Netherlands.

Your background

Essential Criteria:

• Fluent in Dutch and English.

• Proven track record of proposal writing.

• An understanding of Netherlands' local policies, regulations, and standards.

• Understanding of regulatory systems, especially in the context of circular economies.

• Experience in project management, especially in the Netherlands.

We're particularly interested in people who have:

• Prior experience in the urban climate transition, low carbon construction, policy & regulation innovation, and/or finance innovation.

• Strong networking skills with connections at the ‘medior’ level in related fields.

• Experience in organizing or coordinating events/conferences.

Some areas of experience that might make the learning curve easier:

• Previous work or collaboration with Dutch municipalities.

• In-depth knowledge of the principles of a circular economy.

• Experience with / skills in strategic design, digital systems design, data-driven policy innovation.

• 3-5 years of experience with one or more of the following: urban climate transition, low carbon construction, policy & regulatory innovation, finance innovation.

Activities and questions you might start with:

• Relationship Management: What strategies can we employ to strengthen and maintain the existing trust built with stakeholders in Amsterdam, particularly in collaborations like CircuLaw?

• Strategic Project Evolution: How can CircuLaw adapt to new phases and challenges? How can we ensure that the learnings from CircuLaw and DM enrich one another for a holistic approach?

• Opportunity Exploration: Which upcoming opportunities in the Netherlands align with DM's broader vision, and how can we best engage with them?

• Stakeholder Collaboration: Organize a gathering centered around the theme of innovative financial strategies for sustainable urban transformation. The focus would be on fostering conversations and partnerships that address the nuances of urban space challenges, from climate resilience to accommodating a growing population.

Who you might work closely with:

• Joost Beunderman: Director of DM Netherlands - Driving the strategic direction of DM in the Netherlands.

• Romy Snijders: Strategic Designer, CircuLaw Lead - Your go-to for everything related to CircuLaw.

• Oliver Burgess: Strategic Designer - Collaborate on translating global strategies to localized actions.

• Rob de Jong: Entity Holder of DM Netherlands - Ensuring that DM’s vision is intact and thriving in the Netherlands.

• Emily Harris: New Economic Theory Mission Lead - A thought partner for aligning strategies with broader economic paradigms.

How we work

We're a multi disciplinary and distributed team based around the globe. What's important to us is using the context and local conditions of projects to grow our knowledge and use it to iterate our thinking and practice across all of our work. 

In the Netherlands, the team involved with Circulaw typically have two office days a week in Amsterdam. It’s nice to come to the office occasionally, but it’s not mandatory. You might also encounter slightly more hierarchical organising structures within the Circulaw ecosystem than you would in our Dark Matter Ecosystem.

We pride ourselves on learning, experimentation and intuition, and look to provide members of the team ways in which they can grow their own knowledge and practice. We view projects, processes and how we work as an evolving design that you would be part of shaping.

Here's a little on how we currently organise:

• We all work remotely, with flexible working hours around schedules (most people do main hours between 9-6).

• We work as self-managing dynamic hierarchies. There aren’t fixed line managers or fixed job descriptions - we have different areas of expertise and focus and we pick up and shed roles as required. This requires good communication, high emotional intelligence and levels of trust.

• We run on a series of digital tools that we use daily to coordinate. We check daily to say good morning/afternoon/evening and talk about what we're learning.

• We're organised in multidisciplinary working groups that span missions, capabilities, and projects. Each working group is flexible and spans a series of projects to form a portfolio of work.

• This setup allows us to be a platform organisation and to nurture and grow ideas the team are passionate about, and advance our core values and mission.

• In time and experience, we invite everyone to grow our portfolio of work as a way to grow our collective skills, knowledge, and ideas – this is an invitation, not an obligation.

You will be supported by the wider Dark Matter Labs team (currently circa 60 around the globe) and connect with them remotely on a day-to-day basis. We also engage regularly for joint learning and development which includes:

• DM download – a regular meet up (usually online) to share learning across key areas of our work.

• Reflections - a chance to collectively reflect on what we are learning, how we are showing up and what we are sensing.

• Personal development and learning sessions - org-wide sessions for us to take leadership in our own personal development; including building our muscles of self-reflection and the characteristics required for trust.

• Virtual, hybrid and face-to-face gatherings.

We highly value lived experience as a form of expertise and we consider having a broad and diverse range of lived experience within the team as being critical for us to be able to do our best possible work together, and to create a range of spaces and accommodate a broad spectrum of life experience into our planetary team.

Dark Matter Labs continues to educate, question and critically review ourselves on how we can improve. We recognise and celebrate the true value of a safe and accepting working environment that - among other things - a diverse team with distributed power can unlock, and work to address our underlying biases and power structures that can prevent that from materialising.

This type of work requires the willingness to work on yourself, your relationships with power, the assumptions and experiences that influence how you think, and more.*

*We recognise that our work deals with some existential questions and content that can be triggering. We have a team focused on the team's mental health and personal development and we continue to incrementally build the necessary psychological infrastructures for this work.

We know that there is more that we can do to make this recruitment more accessible, particularly if you have experienced exclusion, disadvantage or discrimination, or if you have particular accessibility needs. We would be happy to provide any further support that you may require - please get in touch so that we can work together to provide that.

Our Pay Structure

Our approach to pay is not based on favoring one skill over another or rewarding hierarchical power dynamics. Instead, we recognize that everyone possesses unique and exceptional skills, and we remove the process of valuing and comparing them. This allows us to focus on unleashing those skills in diverse ways based on the specific context. It gives us the freedom to determine, assign, and assess roles based on what is most suitable for each situation, rather than being constrained by predefined roles tied to compensation.

We recognise that no formula can fully account for the unique contexts of every person. Therefore we have a rebalancing process in place to accommodate individual circumstances.

Our current base pay for everyone on the team is: Formula = (((Years experience + 23) (+ 8.82 for freelancers)) *1000) = gross pro rata pay in GBP.

Years experience includes all experience after school completion age (18) - inc work, education, unpaid work (care, volunteering, etc).

We have recently put in place a range of benefits support across the team, including coaching, learning funds, sabbatical and secondment support, learning funds, workspace funds and more. These were set collectively by the team and vary according to statutory provisions in different geographies - we’ll be happy to confirm the relevant approach for your geography and contract type.

Our holiday policy is a minimum of 28 days/year pro-rata, but we encourage you to take all of the time that you need to properly rest.