Engagement Manager

The Role

The Engagement Manager is the quarterback of Realize 2050’s consulting teams. You’ll lead day-to-day execution across projects with utilities, energy tech startups, and innovation-forward corporates. You’ll scope strategy, design creative engagement structures, direct analysis, and help translate insights into pilots, tools, and venture concepts that can scale. This is not a role for someone who prefers a playbook; this is for someone who knows when to write a new one.

You’ll act as the primary interface for client stakeholders, lead internal and external workstreams, and play a critical role in shaping how Realize builds ventures, validates new ideas, and turns early concepts into products and commercial offerings, particularly around emerging grid technologies.

What You’ll Do

Client & Project Leadership

• Own and run client engagements from initial framing through delivery
• Serve as the primary client point of contact, translating ambiguous goals into executable strategies and clear build/test priorities
• Scope and deliver analytical, commercial, and strategic outputs, often in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Structure workshops, develop discovery frameworks, and synthesize insights that help clients make real-world decisions about what to pilot, build, or scale

Strategic Innovation

• Design and test new business models with utilities and their partners
• Bring a systems-thinking lens to engagements that span infrastructure, policy, market development, and product adoption
• Identify whitespace opportunities for spinouts, commercialization, or productization of new capabilities
• Help shape internal IP and toolkits for engagement repeatability and reusable product or platform concepts

Team Development

• Manage 1–3-person teams on most projects, including analysts and subject-matter collaborators
• Provide thoughtful feedback and mentorship to support skill growth
• Collaborate with senior partners to refine Realize’s consulting and venture- and product-building offerings

You Might Be a Fit If You Have

• 6+ years of relevant experience in strategy consulting, energy innovation, product development, or venture building
• A consulting toolkit (problem structuring, stakeholder synthesis, slide design, analysis) paired with experience taking ideas from concept to pilot or MVP
• Experience with energy system actors: utilities, developers, government, or gridtech startups
• Strong financial modeling skills and an ability to quickly structure models in new domains (e.g., PPAs, undergrounding economics, DER value stacks)
• Comfort working with emerging tech, including AI and energy software
• Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills
• Curiosity, urgency, and humility

Bonus Points For

• Experience working inside a utility or leading engagements for them
• A track record of launching or advising early-stage ventures or products
• Exposure to grid planning, data center siting, distributed energy, or grid modernization
• Familiarity with public-private funding strategies or energy policy

What We Offer

• Meaningful work that shapes the future of the grid and energy innovation

• Flat, entrepreneurial culture where your ideas can become ventures

• Exposure to top-tier clients and founders across the energy ecosystem

• Competitive compensation and flexibility in where and how you work
• This is a contract with Potential toward W2.