Practice Lead, Applied AI & Systems Engineering

About ThinkLabs

The electric grid is being asked to do something it was never designed to do. US electricity demand is projected to grow roughly 25% by 2030 and roughly 80% by 2050, driven primarily by the AI boom. The tools utilities have relied on for decades — multi-month engineering studies, one-off episodic planning cycles — cannot move at the pace this moment requires.

ThinkLabs AI exists to close that gap. We've built the first commercial physics-informed AI digital twin of the grid, capable of running power flow analyses at 99%+ accuracy and compressing multi-week studies into minutes. We're deployed at multiple large utilities and named to the 2025 CB Insights AI 100.

We're growing fast and are building out a world-class leadership team to match the scale we're stepping into.

‍

About the Role

We are building the premier Applied AI & Systems Engineering practice for Tier 1 T&D utilities and ISO/RTO clients. The Practice Lead is the architect of that practice — owning the intersection of AI, classical power systems engineering, and enterprise software delivery, as ThinkLabs converts technical capability into repeatable customer value and durable recurring revenue.

This is deliberately not a services or delivery-management role. It's a practice: you are expected to champion what the customer needs, shape the solution using ThinkLabs' internal resources, and personally drive that solution through to delivery — the way a strategic advisory partner would, but with your hands genuinely on the software.

This role spans the full engagement lifecycle: shaping opportunities before a contract exists, designing the methodologies that win client trust, and owning delivery quality and outcomes. You'll rapidly map the current-state workflow, determine where ThinkLabs can be injected, quantify business-value hypotheses, and lead delivery of products and services that accelerate the sales and value cycle in a risk-averse, highly regulated industry.

You'll build and lead a team that we expect to reach roughly 5 people within the first few months of your start, growing further over the following 6–9 months. We're hiring this function top-down: you come in first, and you build the team beneath you.

‍

What You'll Do

Pre-Sales & Business Development

• Lead technical pursuits and proposal development for enterprise and infrastructure clients
• Shape scope, methodology, and commercial structure for AI systems engagements
• Represent ThinkLabs at industry conferences, working groups, and client executive briefings
• Build and maintain relationships with senior counterparts at engineering consultancies and cloud/AI partners
  

Discovery & Readiness

• Partner with Sales / Client Directors to design and run paid discovery engagements before or alongside a POV / first deployment sale
• Conduct current-state analysis — pain points, AI readiness, data/model gaps, decision delays, organizational friction — across planning and operations workflows
• Advise on the most applicable ThinkLabs use cases, develop business-value hypotheses, and recommend the first value case to prove
• Define success criteria, baseline metrics, required data, stakeholders, timeline, and executive decision path
• Identify integration constraints, data quality gaps, and change management considerations early
  

Supercharge Time-to-Value, Convert to Production

• Draw a clear line between proving the technology works and proving a specific business impact that justifies production licensing
• Run the bridge from discovery to a scoped proof-of-value, delivered as AI-enabled services or services-as-software driving direct, high-impact outcomes
• Define the mutual success plan, technical validation, executive readout, and production-license recommendation
• Keep services commercially grounded — paid studies and delivery are a means to recurring revenue, not the destination business model
  

Own Delivery, Adoption & Expansion

• Build the repeatable practice methodology: templates and playbooks for discovery, workflow mapping, use-case prioritization, value hypothesis, scoping, kickoff, data readiness, technical workplan, executive readout, and production conversion
• Coordinate Product, Engineering, ML/Data, Forward Deployed Engineering, Power Systems, partners, and customer stakeholders to deliver value quickly and credibly
• Manage project and program risk, schedule, and client expectations with the rigor of an engineering firm
• Clear delivery blockers around customer data, IT/security, model validation, cloud deployment, adoption, and executive alignment
• After the first value case is proven and the deal is won, partner with the Account Executive / Client Director to build the account's expansion roadmap
• Own the metrics that matter: discovery quality, time-to-value, POV-to-production conversion, customer health, referenceability, renewal, and recurring-revenue conversion
  

Practice Development

• Build and lead a team of AI deployment engineers, power systems engineers, and delivery managers — targeting roughly 5 people in the first few months and building the business unit to as many as 20 within 3 years
• Define the practice's service catalog, delivery standards, and quality assurance framework
• Feed deployment realities back to Product and Engineering
• Contribute to thought leadership — whitepapers, case studies, speaking engagements
  

‍

What We're Looking For

The bar that matters most for this role is enterprise software delivered into the business — not just the IT organization. Whether you've been leading engagement teams at a Big Four firm, running enterprise platform deployments, or scaling a software delivery practice inside a growth-stage company, the deciding question is: did you own delivery of software that a business team actually adopted and ran on, at meaningful scale?

Must-haves

• A track record leading delivery of enterprise software or platform engagements in the high-single to low-double-digit millions of dollars — not just engineering studies or advisory reports
• Experience credibly holding your own in front of both a technical/IT audience and a business audience — you can speak the language of both
• A builder's temperament: you're scrappy by default, hands-on at any altitude, and don't wait for headcount or process to move work forward
• Comfortable operating in a risk-averse, highly regulated, slow-moving industry while still pushing pace
  

Strongly preferred

• Utility / grid domain exposure, ideally transmission planning or transmission-adjacent — though we are flexible here in favor of stronger software delivery experience
• Prior stint in a technical/engineering role before moving into strategic delivery — enough to hold technical credibility, not necessarily years of hands-on engineering
• Background from firms such as Deloitte, Accenture, or CGI (consulting), or enterprise platform companies such as Palantir, Snowflake, or Databricks (if the deployment work reached the business side, not only IT)

Note on domain fit: we're intentionally opening the aperture here. This is a genuinely new category — a software company solving classical engineering problems — so there is no perfect precedent hire. We will flex hard on distribution

or DER-specific experience being absent, but transmission exposure (even brief) is a plus. What we won't flex on is the software delivery bar above.

‍

Why This Role, Why Now

ThinkLabs is heading into a growth inflection point — larger accounts, larger contracts. This role is being built now specifically because the company needs a repeatable delivery motion in place before that scale hits, not after. You'll have real investment behind this build: headcount, compensation flexibility, and direct access to the CEO to shape the practice from its earliest days.