Strategic Partnerships Intern

Key Responsibilities

• Support strategic partner relationships by helping manage ongoing engagement with corporate, investor, philanthropic, and ecosystem partners and ensuring commitments, opportunities, and follow-up activities are executed effectively.


• Connect Engine companies to commercial opportunities by understanding partner priorities and company needs and facilitating introductions to prospective customers, strategic partners, pilot opportunities, technical collaborators, and other potential pathways to market.


• Support investor and capital connections by helping identify relevant investors for Engine companies, coordinating investor introductions and programming, and supporting events and initiatives designed to connect founders with sources of capital.


• Translate partnerships into founder value by working with internal teams and external partners to identify resources that can help Tough Tech companies develop technologies more capital efficiently, including technical expertise, equipment, services, infrastructure, software, and other forms of support.


• Develop an understanding of The Engine's company community, including company technologies, business models, development milestones, commercial priorities, and fundraising needs, in order to identify relevant opportunities and connections.


• Coordinate partnership activations and programs, including partner meetings, company introductions, office hours, workshops, Innovation Days, investor engagements, founder programming, and other strategic initiatives.


• Prepare partner and company materials, including company shortlists, briefing documents, presentations, meeting materials, partnership updates, and follow-up communications.


• Conduct research and analysis on companies, industries, technologies, investors, corporate innovation priorities, and emerging partnership opportunities.


• Maintain strong operational discipline around partnership activity by tracking introductions, commitments, meetings, opportunities, and follow-ups in The Engine's CRM and other internal systems.


• Collaborate across The Engine with programs, community, events, communications, and leadership teams to ensure partnerships are coordinated effectively and deliver meaningful value to founders.


• Support additional partnership development, ecosystem initiatives, and special projects as needed.

We recognize that strong candidates may come from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds. The ideal candidate will bring a combination of technical curiosity, business judgment, relationship-building skills, and strong execution.

• Bachelor's degree required; recent graduates, graduate students, or MBA candidates are encouraged to apply.


• Academic or professional background in engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, climate or energy, another physical or life science discipline, business, or a related field.


• Strong interest in emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, commercialization, venture capital, corporate innovation, or the startup ecosystem.


• Ability to quickly understand complex scientific or technical concepts and communicate their commercial relevance to nontechnical audiences.


• Strong interpersonal skills and comfort engaging with founders, investors, corporate executives, technical experts, and other external stakeholders.


• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.


• Highly organized, detail-oriented, and able to manage multiple projects, relationships, and follow-up activities simultaneously.


• Demonstrated initiative and ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, entrepreneurial environment.


• Strong research, analytical, and problem-solving skills


• Preferred: Startups, venture capital, accelerators, incubators, or entrepreneurship programs


• Preferred: Corporate innovation, strategy, business development, or partnerships


• Preferred: Technology commercialization or university technology transfer


• Preferred: Consulting, investment banking, or other analytically rigorous business environments


• Preferred: Scientific or engineering research


• Preferred: Climate tech, biotech, advanced manufacturing, robotics, computing, materials, or other Tough Tech sectors


• Preferred: CRM platforms and relationship-management tools

This listing is from Lever. View original listing ↗