Engagement Director

Engagement Director

Are you a strategic operator who can manage complex stakeholder environments while ensuring real world impact is delivered and clearly demonstrated? We are looking for an Engagement Director to own most of critical funder relationships, coordinate multi country delivery, and translate outcomes into compelling narratives. You'll work at the intersection of governments, funders, and delivery teams - shaping how we build trust, enter new markets and scale impact across sectors like healthcare, water and energy.

About Sand

Sand Technologies is a global Physical AI company using data and AI to make critical industries work better. We partner with governments, cities and enterprises to improve how essential systems operate across healthcare, water, energy, telecommunications and infrastructure.

Our work delivers proven real-world impact. We have built AI systems that help manage London’s water supply, supported telecom network planning across hundreds of cities, and developed digital healthcare platforms serving tens of millions of people across Africa. From intelligent command centers to AI-powered infrastructure platforms, we help organizations sense, analyze and act in complex environments.

Our people are ambitious, curious and relentlessly practical. Our teams work alongside clients in the field, solving hard problems and deploying solutions that last. With colleagues across Africa, Europe, the UK and the US, we operate across the full stack - from research and engineering to deployment and capability building.

Our mission is simple: to harness AI to solve humanity’s most pressing challenges.

About the role

Sand is seeking an Engagement Director to serve as the central point of ownership for our funder relationships, ensuring alignment, delivery excellence, and clear demonstration of impact across our programs.

This role sits at the intersection of strategy, stakeholder management, delivery coordination, and storytelling. You will act as the connective tissue between funders, country teams, and central functions (finance, impact, product), ensuring that we consistently deliver value, communicate progress credibly, and build long-term, trust-based partnerships.

Beyond managing current engagements, you will play a critical role in shaping how Sand enters and operates in new markets, working closely with Country Directors and leadership teams to build trusted relationships with ministries, structure partnerships, and lay the foundations for scalable impact.

What You’ll Do

• Act as the primary point of contact and owner for key funder relationships, ensuring consistent alignment on objectives, expectations, and delivery progress

• Drive a proactive approach to demonstrating value and impact, not just reporting activity. Anticipate risks, surface issues early, and manage stakeholder expectations effectively

• Coordinate across country teams, product, finance, and impact functions to ensure coherent delivery and timely and high-quality reporting to funders

• Drive the Impact function to translate results into compelling narratives by curating and communicating stories of value and real-world outcomes

• Partner with Country Directors to support entry into new markets and help shape strategies on how to build trust and credibility with ministries and public sector stakeholders

• Build and institutionalise playbooks, frameworks, and tools for stakeholder engagement and delivery

• Ensure teams across markets operate with consistency and clarity and capture learnings and continuously improve how we engage with funders and governments

• Support the development of future funding opportunities and partnerships

• Identify and engage ecosystem partners (funders, NGOs, multilaterals, private sector actors)

• Contribute to proposals and strategic positioning for new programs

Who You Are

• 8–12+ years of experience in consulting, stakeholder engagement, public sector advisory, or similar roles

• Strong experience managing senior stakeholders (funders, governments, partners)

• Proven ability to operate across strategy and execution in complex environments

• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, both written and verbal

• Highly structured thinker, able to bring clarity to ambiguity and coordinate across multiple teams

• Experience working in multi-country, multi-stakeholder environments

• Familiarity with public sector engagement, development programs, or donor-funded initiatives is a strong plus.

How we work

Due to the highly collaborative and internationally distributed nature of our work, successful candidates must be comfortable operating in small teams while contributing to larger, globally coordinated efforts. A strong sense of ownership, self-motivation and discipline in maintaining clear and consistent communication through virtual collaboration tools and video conferencing is essential.