Now Hiring: Executive Director

Location: Tillamook County, Oregon | Position Type: Full-time, exempt | Reports To: Board of Directors

About the Role

Tillamook Estuaries Partnership is seeking its next Executive Director: a mission-enabling, people-centered, externally credible leader to help TEP stay focused, well-resourced, trusted, and effective as it advances conservation and restoration work across Tillamook County’s estuaries and watersheds.

TEP is the National Estuary Program for Tillamook County, Oregon. We conserve and restore the county’s estuaries and watersheds through science, restoration, monitoring, education, and partnership. The organization is respected, effective, and deeply rooted in place, with expert staff, strong partner relationships, and a reputation built on credible, science-based work.

The organization is entering an important and exciting chapter in a shifting funding landscape. Its public visibility is increasing, and the Estuary Science Center is moving from vision toward reality—a new facility for estuary research, education, and community connection on Tillamook Bay. The next Executive Director will build upon what already makes TEP trusted and effective, while strengthening the strategy, funding, systems, partnerships, staff support, and public presence needed for the next stage of impact.

This is also a place-based leadership opportunity on the Oregon Coast, where the mission is visible in the landscape every day: estuaries, bays, rivers, working lands, coastal forests, small towns, and the Pacific Ocean. For the right candidate, Tillamook County offers far more than a beautiful setting. The new director will find life shaped by beautiful landscapes, close community ties, and daily connection to land and water.

Responsibilities

• Vision, focus, and mission alignment: Help TEP clarify and carry forward its long-term vision, multi-year priorities, CCMP alignment, and operational focus. Decide what to pursue, what to delay, and how to keep major initiatives aligned with the core watershed mission.
• A thriving expert team: Create conditions for staff to do excellent work: clarity, trust, support, accountability, strong communication, and operating rhythms that help people stay aligned and bring their best thinking forward.
• Funding strategy and financial sustainability: Lead a durable, mission-aligned funding strategy that protects TEP’s public and federal funding base while growing major donor, corporate, foundation, and philanthropic support.
• Science-based trust and partnerships: Protect and strengthen TEP’s reputation as a trusted, science-based resource. Represent the organization with credibility, communicate complex work clearly, and convene people and groups with different interests around shared watershed priorities.
• Board partnership and governance effectiveness: Work closely with the Board so it has the information, role clarity, strategic context, and decision-ready support needed to govern well and partner effectively with the Executive Director.

Qualifications

You may be a strong fit for this role if you are:

• Empowering and service-minded: You create clarity, trust expertise, and place ownership and decision-making with the people closest to the work.
• Low ego, but completely confident: Exhibit a strong public presence, representing TEP without making the work about yourself.
• Curious and steady: You listen deeply, look for patterns and root causes, and stay grounded under pressure or complexity.
• An adaptive communicator: You can translate complex, science-based work across different audiences without oversimplifying or losing credibility.
• Relationship-centered: You build trust patiently with people and groups who may bring different perspectives, priorities, or levels of technical understanding.
• Rooted in place: You understand that Tillamook County is rural, relationship-driven, and locally connected, and you are willing to earn credibility through consistent presence, local listening, and genuine community connection.

Pay

$106,000–$155,900, plus full benefits

Schedule

Priority Deadline: Sunday, August 2nd, 2026 | Preferred start date: October 1, 2026