Lead Land Rights Manager

Red Cap Energy has been developing wind projects in South Africa since 2009, which puts 17 years behind us and makes us one of the very few developers in this market still fully South African owned. We developed Kouga, Gibson Bay and the Impofu wind farms, all now operational, putting over 500 MW of renewable power onto the national grid. Our portfolio runs to more than 3.8 GW across development stages and now spans wind, solar PV and battery storage. We have pioneered the extensive transmission lines needed to unlock our projects, and we are moving from developing wind farms to owning and operating them, which broadens what a career here can look like.

Land is where all of it begins. We are looking for a Lead Land Rights Manager to head our land function across the full development portfolio.

The role

You will hold internal accountability for securing and protecting the land rights our projects depend on, and for the quality and capability of the team that delivers that work. It is a dual role, and neither side is optional.

On the leadership side you will lead a four-person specialist team made up of Land Rights Manager(s), a Contracts Manager and an in-house Legal Counsel. You will own the suite of land agreements, set the negotiation mandates the team works within, step into the hardest negotiations yourself, and hold portfolio-level oversight of land status and risk.

On the delivery side you stay hands-on. You will open new project areas, make first contact with landowners, build the credibility that everything afterwards depends on, then hand over cleanly to a Land Rights Manager while keeping the key relationships. When the business needs it, you will carry a single project’s land portfolio directly. The balance between the two sides shifts with what the business needs at the time.

What we are looking for

Priority one is applied command of renewable energy land agreements and the South African development process. Wind and solar option agreements with servitude and long-term lease annexures, power line servitudes, Eskom and NTCSA grid servitude agreements. You should know not only what the clauses say, but where terms can flex and where they cannot. That judgement comes only from high-volume negotiation and real time in the field.

You will also need working command of the frameworks that land activity must be sequenced against: environmental authorisation under NEMA, SPLUMA, grid connection, Schedule 2 generation registration, and the REIPPPP and private PPA procurement routes.

Priority two is people and process. Proven ability to lead a small specialist team, including directing legal and contracts functions, to set standards, hold quality, and actively build the team’s capability rather than only supervising its output.

Beyond that, we are looking for someone strong at cold, first-contact engagement, and an advanced negotiator with the emotional intelligence to be equally effective with a rural subsistence farmer and a commercial landowner’s attorney. Spatial data tools should be a daily working instrument, not an occasional one.

Practical details

• Relevant tertiary qualification, for example environmental, town and regional planning, property or a related field. An LLB is not required.
• Business-level fluency in Afrikaans is essential, as much of our landowner engagement is conducted in Afrikaans. Fluency in isiXhosa or another relevant language is a strong advantage.
• Typically at least eight years in land rights, with the weight on depth rather than duration. We judge experience on the volume and quality of real negotiation, not years on a CV.
• Renewable energy developer experience is strongly preferred. We will consider strong candidates from adjacent fields, for example planning with municipal lease and servitude negotiation, or infrastructure land acquisition.
• Travel of roughly one to one and a half weeks a month, including overnight stays in remote and rural areas. If you are coming from a high-volume IPP environment, this is likely to be less time away from home than you are used to.
• Hybrid, with one to two days a week in our Hout Bay office.
• Remuneration is market related and negotiable.

How we work

We are a small and deeply experienced team that runs on an idea we call Pilot in Command: if you have the information and the judgement, you make the call, and we back you for it. This role carries real authority over the agreements the company enters into and the standards that govern them, with a short line to the Development Manager for the decisions that sit above it.

If this is the kind of work you want to be doing, we would like to hear from you. Apply through LinkedIn.