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Associate Director, Engagement

New York, New York, United States

Associate Director, Engagement 

Our Engagement team plays a pivotal and strategic role in our consultancy’s operations to deliver great work, build long-term client relationships, and drive business results. This team creates the conditions for success by inventing new processes and systems, bringing operational rigor, and architecting relationships built on trust. They understand the unique needs and motivations of our clients and our internal teams and continuously identify ways to advocate for both, ensuring projects are successful, on time and of unrivaled quality.

As Associate Director, Engagement, you are a seasoned leader who makes client management and production look seamless—routinely getting ahead of problems before they arise. They ensure teams have the right people, processes, and resources to deliver high-quality, thoughtful solutions, while directing others across a range of project types and bridging work across multiple phases. Equally comfortable zooming out to the big picture and diving into day-to-day details, they bring sharp judgment and deep expertise in risk management—spotting issues early, executing solutions, and escalating when needed. With high standards of polish and integrity, they proactively protect and elevate Proto’s world-class work at every stage.

What you will do:

  • Distill client challenges and needs into pragmatic project approaches, plans, proposals, and scopes of work for client engagements that uniquely serve business problems and set up intersectional teams for successful delivery;
  • Leverage strong EQ and IQ skills to navigate ambiguous projects and external and internal relationships to ensure dots are connected while building confidence in the process and the work;
  • Manage projects end to end internally and externally, also serving as the day to day client interface on projects to clarify strategic requirements and manage expectations;  
  • Innovate, optimize, and maintain systems and processes that support optimal ways of working for our clients, partners, and internal teams from project start to finish; 
  • Communicate often, clearly, and effectively with clients, project teams and company leadership, even amidst difficult situations; 
  • Continuously anticipate project and team needs and plan for potential challenges multiple steps ahead to derisk and deescalate;
  • Show a keen interest and curiosity in the team’s work as a custodian of the client’s business, providing your unique perspective, while balancing practitioners’ expertise and client’s requests;  
  • Negotiate scopes, proposals, timelines and budgets with internal and external stakeholders; 
  • Motivate teams to reach common objectives, maintaining calm under pressure in a fast-paced, constantly evolving environment;
  • Partner with discipline leads and Partner of Engagement to make casting, process and financial recommendations for projects.

Qualifications:

  • 6-10 years of experience managing large scale digital, product, service and/or innovation projects within in a client engagement, digital production, project management or operations role, preferably in a consultancy, branding or corporate strategy company;
  • 1+ years of experience cultivating relationships with senior stakeholders and c-level executives;
  • Strong attention to detail and highly organized amidst a fast-paced environment;
  • Comfortable working with collaboration tools and communication platforms (Slack, Google Suite, Figma, etc.);
  • Must be willing to travel at least 30%.

In New York City, the base salary for this position is $125-150K. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors including years of relevant skills and experience, level of responsibility, and qualifications. This position reports into our Partner, Head of Engagement.

Proto is a New York based company with offices at 3 World Trade. Our staff is encouraged to work-from-office on days of their choosing based on personal preferences, collaboration moments, client meetings, and all-company gatherings. We also support workplace flexibility and have made work-from-anywhere available to all staff (within a 3-hour time zone of eastern standard time zone). Our core business hours are generally 9:30am-6:00pm EST; however, due to our client service model and collaborative working culture, individual working hours fluctuate to reflect client deadlines and deliverables.

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