Senior Consultant, Emerging Technologies and Defense

Vanguard Europe; Brussel Hoofdstad; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Vanguard Europe, based in Brussels, seeks a Senior Consultant in Emerging Technologies and Defense to drive client delivery and strategic initiatives. This is a high-impact, strategic role in a mission-driven consultancy focusing on technology and defense in the EU context.

The role blends client-facing delivery, business development, and cross-team collaboration, with travel across the EU, UK, and US as needed. Strong writing, network, and policy insight are essential for success.

Qualifications

• Experience navigating high-stakes environments in EU policy/defense contexts.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with concise policy messaging.
• Extensive network across EU institutions, industry, think tanks, and defense ecosystem.
• Proven ability to identify opportunities, pitch value, and close deals with senior leaders.

Responsibilities

• Deliver client-ready artefacts and manage client relationships across engagements.
• Develop proposals and engage potential clients, aligning needs with Vanguard Europe capabilities.
• Collaborate on projects and contribute to the Vanguard Europe core team across settings.
• Grow within the organization, taking on leadership responsibilities as the firm expands.

Skills

Client acquisition

Network

Comms

Analysis

Job description

Senior Consultant, Emerging Technologies and Defense

Context

The European Union is, for the first time in history, faced with a geopolitical landscape that challenges its raison d’etre. Built as an interdependency mechanism meant to ensure peace on the European continent, the EU is both brilliantly successful in its mission and woefully unprepared to deal with the harsh realities of the emerging multipolar geopolitical order. To protect the values upon which it was founded, the EU needs to transform into a genuine geopolitical power -- or risk becoming an increasingly irrelevant project of a bygone era. This transformation brings with it shifts -- and ruptures -- in the fabric of the Union. The political focus on competitiveness, resilience, and defense is a much needed step in the right direction, but it is not without tradeoffs, including polarization, centralization of power, structural vulnerability, and democratic erosion.

The EU “bubble” is also undergoing a profound transformation. Institutions are becoming more hermetic and centralized, regulatory uncertainty is increasing, and the knowledge gap between those at the bleeding edge of innovation and EU civil servants is widening. Business as usual in the EU bubble, now also sloppified by the excessive use of AI-generated content, is no longer a winning proposition.

Enter you. You’re an exceptionally skilled Brussels navigator, spending your days thinking about technology, about defense, and about technology and defense. Your mind is sharpened in the nuances of policy and EU legalese to the extent that you find AI summaries innocent and endearing, if useless. Your rolodex won third place in the last five annual rolodex contests in Brussels. Your writing skills have already quietly picked up on what you would improve in this text to make it more fluent, more balanced, and more compelling. Your political intuition sees connections across domains and across geographies, and you often find yourself mentally correcting press reporting on EU affairs. And you’re out there on a mission, which keeps you up at night and gets you out of bed in the morning: to help build a strong, democratic, and prosperous Union, fit for the geopolitical realities of today and the uncertainties of tomorrow.

About Vanguard Europe

Vanguard Europe is a mission-driven company. Our goal is to empower clients aligned with the long-term strategic objectives that contribute to the European Union’s success on the global stage: strong coordination with democratic countries and NATO, technological competitiveness, strategic resilience, democratic consolidation, and security and defense.

To that end, we leverage cutting‑edge expertise to generate in-depth policy insights and to effect high‑impact change. We specialize in distilling nuanced policy and political intelligence, creating powerful long‑term narratives, galvanizing mission‑driven coalitions for effective advocacy, and building projects with strategic added value.

True to our mission, we do not collaborate with entities owned or controlled by authoritarian regimes or linked with extremist ideologies.

This mission statement informs our approach to doing business:

First, we are mission-driven to the core, with clear red lines: we only work with clients whose success means furthering, directly or indirectly, democratic goals and NATO’s raison d’etre (https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/1949/04/04/the-north-atlantic-treaty). This sometimes means saying no to potentially lucrative contracts -- with no hesitation and no regrets.

Second, we carefully select our clients, just as they select us, targeting collaborations where our work has the highest potential impact. That means we prefer to work with mission-driven organizations, where values alignment can generate synergistic effects, and we aim to stay within our areas of expertise: emerging technologies, defense, and the intersection thereof.

Third, we focus on high-end deliverables and take an old-school approach to the use of generative AI: we craft and refine every analytical output we deliver to clients ourselves, from a one-sentence email to a 20-page report. No exceptions. We sell our analytical power, experience, and expertise, not our AI subscription.

The role

Vanguard Europe is a young company, established in 2024. In a city with over 500 consultancies, staffed with highly qualified individuals, we need strong differentiators to maintain a competitive edge. One of our differentiators is our team – including you.

The Senior Consultant, Emerging Technologies and Defense is a key hire in the growth trajectory of the company. We see this hire as the decisive step in a journey that takes Vanguard Europe from five to ten, to twenty or more colleagues.

Your job will be nothing short of an adventure. It won’t be easy, but it will be rewarding, day in and day out. Here’s what you’ll do:

50% Client-side delivery : You will work with Vanguard clients on a daily basis, and will be in charge of delivering final-stage, client-ready artefacts across the full spectrum of the terms of engagement (intelligence briefs, policy analysis, ecosystem mapping, in-depth reports and the like). You will be the client(s)’ main point of contact with Vanguard Europe and will coordinate client interactions, client delivery, and, equally important, client satisfaction. Whether it is advising a client C-levels, providing analysis, managing advocacy, or guiding a client through the EU maze, ownership and responsibility are in no short supply: your clients, your skills, your results.

25% Client acquisition and business development : You will represent Vanguard Europe across a full spectrum of events, networking occasions, and targeted meetings, both locally and internationally, looking for synergistic engagement opportunities where potential clients’ needs align with the Vanguard Europe mission, vision, values, and capabilities. You will research, think through, and devise calculated proposals for engagement with clients within the Vanguard Europe target group, prioritizing values alignment and quality over quantity.

25% Teamwork and Vanguard Europe projects : You will participate in all Vanguard Europe projects – such as the Genval Forum and the Aurora Coalition – and you will be an integral part of the Vanguard Europe team, relying on colleagues' support for different functional areas in your client work and, symmetrically, lending a hand wherever your skills can support your colleagues in their work.

100% Growth : You will be learning, teaching, failing, winning, and having an amazing time as a key member of the Vanguard Europe core team – with unlimited upward opportunities, constrained only by the number of hours available in a day.

Skills and experience

This is a strategic hire, with significant upward potential. We’re looking for an exceptional operator with a solid set of transferable skills, who can grow into a central leadership position in the team. By its nature, the role requires significant experience in navigating high-stakes and high-profile environments. You should apply if:

Client acquisition : You have the credibility and experience to cultivate potential clients, usually at senior leadership levels, to pitch them, follow up with them, negotiate with them, and close deals. This is a skill developed by doing, so we will be looking to see what deals you have closed in the past – with clients or within the institutions.

Network : You have an extensive network spanning EU institutions, industry, academia, think tanks, and the broader tech and defense ecosystem. We will be looking to understand what types of close contacts you maintain, what your network looks like, how you are maintaining and growing your network, and what kind of convening power you have.

Comms : You have exquisite writing and communications skills, honed through real-world delivery. We will be looking to see not just flawless grammar and spelling, but also critical thinking, structure, logic, and style in your (own) writing.

Analysis : You can follow red threads through time and through multiple contexts, uncovering correlations and tracking causal effects, leveraging your critical thinking and intellectual curiosity. We’ll be looking to see that you not only understand, for example, a policy proposal, but also can place it in a wider political and policy context, understand where it’s coming from and where it will land, and have a good feeling of what its implications will be.

Terms and how to apply

This is a full-time position based in Brussels, Belgium, flexible on work from home. Compensation is competitive. It consists of a fixed component and a performance-based component – distributed between the two according to your risk appetite – and a comprehensive benefits package. Occasional travel within the EU, to the UK, and to the US.

Please do not use AI for your writing. We won’t be using AI to read your application. Even if we can’t tell at this stage (though we usually can), it will come up later on, as this position requires writing your own texts.