Engagement Manager

We're hiring an Engagement Manager

Employment type:

Full Time/Direct Hire

Location:

Northern Virginia/DC Metro Area & Richmond, VA

Location Type:
Hybrid
- Home Office/Local Ippon office

The Ippon story started in 2002 in Paris, France - cue in the accordion. Our founder and CEO Stéphane Nomis used his unique experience as an international Judo champion to create a culture based on the sports values of ambition and excellence. Our USA Headquarters office is located in Richmond, VA, with additional offices in New York, NY, Washington DC, and Charlotte, NC.

We are a technology consulting firm that specializes in helping accelerate our client's digital roadmap in the areas of Product Management, Cloud, Data, and Software Engineering.

The Engagement Manager owns the long-term health, relationship, and growth trajectory of 1–2 assigned strategic accounts. The role sits at the intersection of client relationship stewardship, account revenue growth, and internal orchestration - accountable for extending existing work, originating new opportunities, and making sure the client experiences one coherent Ippon, not a set of disconnected project teams.

The role carries two distinct sets of responsibilities. Billable work: acting as a hands-on project/program lead, applying deep subject matter expertise to the delivery of active engagements. Non-billable work: driving account growth through relationship building, need sensing, and opportunity development. The ideal candidate brings strong project/program management skills, executive presence, a passion for delivering innovative solutions, and the hunger to find and chase growth opportunities.

Financial services domain experience is strongly preferred, along with a genuine curiosity to develop a deep understanding of the client's business.

• Own delivery by serving as a billable consultant, applying project, program, or product management expertise on assigned engagements - matched to what the client's engagement actually needs.
• Develop and manage project/program plans, timelines, budgets, and resource allocation, or own product roadmap and backlog priorities when serving in a product management capacity.
• Lead a regular cadence of client meetings to review status, action items, and deliverables.
• Collaborate with cross-functional and technical teams to keep delivery on time and on budget.
• Identify and mitigate project risks, and resolve issues before they escalated.
• Work with the Technical Lead to assign responsibilities within the project team and set clear expectations.
• Optimize and negotiate resource allocation to maximize project efficiency.
• Ensure the Ippon delivery playbook is followed, and feedback ideas on process improvements.

• Build and personally maintain relationships across multiple levels and functions of the client organization, backed by a live stakeholder/relationship map (role, influence, sentiment, last touchpoint) and a regular cadence of relationship-only touchpoints, separate from project status meetings.
• Understand the client's business strategy, budget cycles, org structure, and competitive pressures well enough to connect Ippon's capability to what the client is actually trying to achieve, bringing outside market and industry perspective into client conversations.

• Own a revenue target for the assigned account(s), delivered through a mix of extension of existing engagements and net-new opportunities; track every active SOW's end date and drive extension conversations 6-8 weeks ahead of expiration.
• Co-draft SOW extensions and change…