Sr Sustainability Specialist - Embodied Carbon Service Lead

Join our national Building Performance certification team - bring your sustainability project leadership expertise for embodied carbon to HGA!

Locations: Minneapolis, MN;
Milwaukee or Madison; WI;
Boston, MA;
Washington, DC;
Sacramento, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, CA

As demand for sustainable, high‑performance environments continues to rise, our work increasingly centers on elevating building performance across a diverse portfolio. As a Sr Sustainability Specialist, you will contribute to projects spanning healthcare facilities, corporate offices, laboratories, museums, local, state, and federal government buildings, higher‑education campuses, and major infrastructure improvements. The ideal candidate brings experience in sustainable design and certification administration.

This role requires working in person and/or on‑site three days per week, with the option to work remotely for the remaining two days.

In this role you will:

• Expand HGA’s LCA services through building strategic partnerships with clients alongside our principals and business developers.
• Provide recommendations to project teams on low-GWP products, structural/material optimization, and procurement strategies.
• Refine and streamline LCA workflow through the development of LCA tools, templates, and other resources to ensure high quality analysis and reports are consistently delivered by the national team.
• Perform WBLCA in partnership with design teams.
• Ability to effectively communicate complex climate mitigation and GHG emissions concepts, in written and oral form, to a diverse range of professionals including clients and multi-disciplinary project teams to give everyone a common understanding.
• Maintain expertise in whole building life cycle assessment methodologies (e.g. ISO
  14040/44, EN 15978).
• Provide sustainability leadership on projects, including:

Additional skills:

• Excellent written & verbal communication skills and experience communicating with technical disciplines.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail.
• Ability to apply intensive and diversified knowledge of principles and practices to broad assignments and devise new approaches to problems encountered.
• Experience facilitating project visioning and goal setting workshops and developing and implementing sustainability goals and targets on projects.
• Balances understanding of the details with high level visioning and goal setting.
• Excellent people skills and the ability to coordinate and collaborate with various disciplines and stakeholders.
• Open and collaborative communication style.
• Ability to multitask and manage time efficiently across multiple projects.
• Meet deadlines and be flexible to changing deadlines.
• Well-developed interpersonal skills, maturity, credibility, confidence, and integrity.
• Focused and highly self-motivated.
• Able to work independently as well as in close collaboration with other staff members and multiple client project team.
• Exercises skills of persuasion and negotiation on critical issues.
• Maintains awareness of risk management for potential project issues and involves PIC/PM if needed.
• Able to teach and mentor team members with different expertise to support knowledge-sharing and elevating the firm’s overall expertise in sustainable design.
• Experience with environmental product declaration and product category rules.

You will need to have:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Architecture, Interior Design, Engineering, Building Science, the Built Environment, Sustainability, or a related field; alternatively, demonstrated competency through a different degree combined with substantial sustainable design experience.
• Background in architecture or…