The Engagement Lead operates in three modes across the lifecycle of a client engagement. The mix varies by engagement, but every Engagement Lead spends meaningful time in all three. You will likely have multiple engagements running concurrently — often in different modes at the same time.
BFS Support
Blueprint for Success is our structured 6–8 week discovery and design engagement — our way of proving capability to a new client. BFS is led by our Chief Data Scientist and CEO, who together do most of the substantive work. The Engagement Lead's job during a BFS is to make them effective.
- Run the logistics: SME scheduling, artifact tracking, meeting cadence, keeping the engagement on its 6–8 week timeline.
- Produce first drafts of executive summaries, slide decks, and documentation that the leads refine.
- Hold the client's hand on everything that isn't the substance — scheduling, follow-ups, deliverable expectations.
- Learn the craft. BFS is where our most senior thinking happens; the Engagement Lead is in the room because that's where the firm's discipline is taught.
- Carry continuity into the engagement that follows. The Engagement Lead who supported the BFS is typically the one who owns the build that comes after.
This mode requires a specific posture. You will not be the lead voice during BFS. You'll be the person making sure the leads have what they need to do their best work — and your judgment about when to insert yourself, when to stay out of the way, and when to quietly pick up something they shouldn't be doing is exactly the kind of judgment we're hiring for.
Build
When an engagement is in build — whether it followed a BFS, or it's a new capability for an existing client — the Engagement Lead is the primary owner.
- Draft, don't transcribe. Intent reaches us three ways: a conversation we turn into a draft, raw material we mine, or a working thing the client built. In every case the move is ours — we draft, they react. Every artifact on the table is one we made. Pick the right tool for each situation: a working session, an agentic interview with client SMEs grounded in existing documentation, a rapid prototype built with Lovable or Replit, a validation pass on something the client brought, a competitive teardown. The tools are situational; the output is constant.
- Read what the client shows you for intent, not as a spec. When a client brings a working sketch, it's full of decisions they didn't mean to make — a data model, a workflow, an auth choice baked into the build. Your job is to read it as what are they trying to do, not rebuild exactly this.
- Produce agentic-ready work. What you hand to engineering must be clear enough that our agentic pipeline can execute on it reliably. Ambiguity in is failure out. Hold the bar.
- Bring a recommendation into every room. We never hand the client a neutral menu. Every set of options comes with the one we'd choose and why, and a straight answer when we think they're headed the wrong way. Respect their call when it comes — but never hand back our edge by failing to take a position.
- Turn the status call into a decision call. There's nothing to chase when build is fast. The standing meeting has one job: the decisions the client owes us. Run the decision queue.
- Steward the outcome, not the feature list. Iterating toward the agreed outcome costs us nothing. Stop counting features. Watch one thing — has the outcome itself changed — and defend the definition of done.
- Partner with engineering as peers. The Director of Engineering and our engineers own the build. You own the intake. The handoff is a clean, decided change — not “the client wants it nicer” but “Version B, this logic, this screen.” A vague handoff burns a cycle, even a cheap one.
Support
When the build has shipped and the engagement is in steady-state:
- Maintain the relationship at a cadence that fits the engagement — close enough to know when something is changing, light enough to respect their time.
- Monitor operational health. Surface issues before the client has to.
- Identify what's next. New build opportunities surface in support mode more often than in any other phase. Bring them into a conversation with the client and with our leadership.
Help Us Mature the Function
We're standing up this role at a moment when our intake process is still maturing. You will help us mature it — process, tooling, the seam between us and the and client systems — to meet the vision of the role. Strong ideas about how to scale SDLC intake in an agentic world are not just welcome; they're the point. If you've already done this somewhere else, we very much want to talk.
What You'll Bring
- 7+ years in a role that bridges client and delivery — Solutions Consultant, Engagement Manager, Sales Engineer, Technical Product Manager, Delivery Lead, or similar. Title matters less than the work.
- Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous client problems and produce clean, decided artifacts engineering can build from. Examples from real engagements, not theory.
- Fluency with agentic and AI-assisted tooling — Lovable, Replit, Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, and the rest of the modern stack. You don't need to write production code, but you should be comfortable using these tools to build prototypes, run discovery, and validate ideas. If you've never opened Lovable, this role is too far ahead of you. If you have opinions about Lovable vs. v0 vs. Bolt for different situations, we want to talk.
- A point of view on how the intake side of the SDLC should work when agentic tooling is doing the build.
- A bias toward taking a position. We owe every client a clear recommendation and honest pushback, especially when we think they're wrong. If your instinct is to lay out options neutrally and let the client pick, this isn't the seat.
- Excellent written and verbal communication. You will spend significant time translating between client business language and engineering precision, and the quality of that translation determines whether the engagement succeeds.
- Comfort with technical depth. You don't write production code, but you understand systems well enough to know when a requirement is unrealistic, when an architectural assumption is shaky, and when to pull the Director of Engineering into a client conversation.
- The right posture for BFS support: humility, attention to detail, willingness to learn from our most senior people by making them effective.
- A bias toward shipping clarity over running ceremony. If your instinct in a stuck conversation is to schedule another meeting, this is probably not the right seat. If your instinct is to build something small and put it in front of the client, it probably is.
- US-based, willing to work East Coast / Central time hours. Preference given to candidates in the St. Louis area for certain client situations.