Engineering Manager

1. Team Leadership and Development

Provide strategic leadership to the development engineering team, fostering a collaborative, organized, and high-performing work environment.

Recruitment & Talent Acquisition: Oversee the hiring process to build a team of skilled and qualified engineering professionals.

Training & Growth: Identify training needs and implement development programs to enhance team capabilities and support career progression

Succession Planning: Identify and develop high-potential team members for future leadership roles, ensuring continuity and long-term team strength.

Performance Management: Conduct regular “check-ins” with team members as well as semi-annual performance evaluations, offering constructive feedback and identifying opportunities for improvement.

Quarterly Planning & Team Building: Organize and lead quarterly on-site gatherings to strengthen team cohesion and align departmental goals.

Subject Matter Expertise & Design Guidance: Serve as a technical mentor and subject matter expert, offering hands-on design guidance, coaching, and support to ensure engineering excellence and professional growth.

Assist in the development of workflows for the engineering team and company.

2. Operational Excellence

Development Engineering: Manage technical strategy throughout the development lifecycle balancing design, energy production, CapEx, constructability, permitting, interconnection, schedule, and overall project economics.

Engineering Standards & Quality Control: Establish and maintain design standards for development drawings and production models to ensure quality and alignment with company objectives.

Process Standardization: Develop and implement standardized workflows and documentation practices (SOPs) to ensure consistency and efficiency across engineering projects.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with internal teams—including land acquisition, interconnection, permitting, real estate, and finance—to deliver critical engineering inputs.

Workload & Task Management: Oversee team workload by assigning tasks, setting priorities, and ensuring timely delivery of high-quality outputs, while empowering engineers to share task delegation and project oversight to promote ownership and leadership development

Resource Planning: Forecast and manage resource needs—including personnel, tools, and budget—to support current and future project demands.

KPI Development & Reporting: Define, track, and report key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure team effectiveness and communicate progress to leadership. Examples of KPIs include but are not limited to: Average days to close tasks by each engineer and tasks complete per week/month/6 months by engineer.

Project Transition Oversight: Ensure seamless handoff of projects from development engineering to project management/construction, supporting long-term project success by checking the design basis, permitting conditions, interconnection requirements, equipment assumptions, constructability, and outstanding technical risks.

External engineering/EOR management: Develop and manage preferred external engineers, manage scopes, budgets, schedules, quality, and deliverables for outside civil, electrical, structural, geotechnical, or other engineering consultants as needed.

Interconnection support: Manage technical requirements and risks coming out of the interconnection process and ensure they are incorporated into the design.

Other duties and responsibilities as requested.

3. Innovation & Continuous Improvement

Knowledge of battery storage systems and experience integrating BESS into layouts, SLDs, equipment selection, and interconnection strategy.

Process Optimization: Champion continuous improvement initiatives by integrating new technologies and best practices to enhance efficiency, sustainability, and project outcomes.

Process Automation: Evaluate and implement software, automation tools and workflows to reduce manual effort, improve accuracy, and accelerate project deliverable timelines.

Value Engineering & Cost Optimization: Lead initiatives focused on applying value engineering principles early in development, optimizing equipment selection, evaluating decisions based on CapEx, and refining design strategies to achieve cost savings in EPC project execution based on production data, constructability, schedule, and long-term project value.

New technologies: Research new technologies in racking, solar panels, inverters, and batteries to ensure the company is using the best possible equipment for the job.

Lessons Learned Integration: Establish a feedback loop from completed projects to capture lessons learned and apply insights to future development efforts and share them with construction team paying special attention to constructability issues, change orders, field experience, and operating performance.

Innovation Culture Building: Foster a culture of innovation within the team by encouraging experimentation, creative problem-solving, and cross-functional idea sharing.

Benchmarking & Best Practices: Conduct regular benchmarking against industry standards and competitors to identify areas for improvement and adopt best practices.

Site visits: Coordinate site visits with team members throughout various stages of project development and construction to provide hands-on exposure to solar design principles and industry best practices.

Experience:

8 years or more of directly related experience in engineering, engineering management, and/or related field required.

Software Experience Preferred:

AutoCAD (Any Version)

PVsyst

HydroCAD (or similar stormwater BMP program)

AutoCAD Civil 3D

AutoTurn

PVcase

Special Requirements:

NABCEP Certification is preferred

Bachelor’s degree in engineering, or related field (master’s preferred).

Requires a high level of interpersonal skills to establish and maintain positive and productive working relationships with both internal and external stakeholders.

Analytical, investigation, and problem-solving skills.

Excellent leadership and communication skills

This position may be subject to assessment of skills, job match and/or aptitude.

Other details:

Current team is comprised of 5 engineers

Plans to expand the team to 7 engineers in the coming years

Manager may be asked to complete site plans, single lines, etc. when needed. Most of the time 75%+ will be spent managing/improving the team.

Work shall be performed from Company’s offices in either Annapolis-MD, Roseville-MN, Boulder-CO, Horseheads-NY, or the Boston-MA area. Employee may be required to travel for approximately 10% of the time.

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.

The expected annual compensation range for this position is $135,000 - $160,000, encompassing base pay and potential incentive target opportunity. This range is a good faith estimate based on the position's requirements. Specific compensation offered to the selected candidate may vary depending on factors such as relevant knowledge, skills, training, experience, and market conditions. Additionally, this position may qualify for a comprehensive benefits package, including Retirement Benefits, Medical, Dental & Vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Account, Life Insurance and Disability, Tuition Reimbursement, Voluntary Benefits, Paid Absences, and more.

About Us:

At New Energy Equity, a proud subsidiary of ALLETE, we’re leading the charge in transforming the energy landscape with innovative solar solutions 🌞. As a top player in the renewable energy sector, we’ve successfully developed over 600MW of solar projects and closed more than $1.2 billion in clean energy investments 💼. Our projects deliver sustainable electricity to a wide range of clients, including commercial,