Espalier Environmental Practice:

Espalier is a decision-intelligence platform purpose-built for environmental services. Our Environmental practice turns fragmented, hard-to-see markets into decisions our clients act on. We do this by pairing deep vertical expertise with a proprietary industry graph and a disciplined analytics engine.

What we do:

The practice runs on a proprietary industry graph spanning demand and supply, ownership structures, M&A activity, and market signals across waste verticals. We translate that graph into commercial strategy, target screening, and market intelligence for the people making capital and growth decisions in the sector.

Who we serve:

- Waste & recycling operators: Commercial strategy, cross-sell and pricing intelligence, market expansion

- Asset-based management companies: Portfolio intelligence, capacity and demand mapping, growth planning

- Private equity sponsors: Buy-and-build theses, target screening, commercial diligence support

- Investment banks: Sell-side positioning, market maps, transaction-likelihood signals

The four verticals we lead:

- Food waste: Demand pulled forward by state organics bans and EPR; fragmented processing and depackaging capacity; RNG and animal-feed off-take economics

- Liquid waste: Non-hazardous liquids, FOG, and industrial wastewater; value concentrated in routing, treatment capacity, and hauler density; highly fragmented

- Hazardous waste: Permitted TSDF and incineration capacity; heavy regulatory barriers to entry; a consolidating, high-margin asset base

- Biosolids: Land application, drying, and incineration pathways; PFAS regulation reshaping the disposal map; long-dated municipal contracts

The Pod operating model:

Each vertical runs as a Pod: a self-contained unit that combines sector expertise, analytics, and the Espalier platform, led by an Engagement Manager. The Pod owns its vertical end-to-end from the underlying dataset to the client recommendation.

Where this role sits:

India is the engine, not the back office. Pod Engagement Managers are vertical leaders. They build the proprietary datasets, run the analysis, and present directly to US executives and sponsors.

The role - Engagement Manager, Pod Leader:

The Engagement Manager leads one Pod. They own their vertical's intelligence, analytics, and client outcomes: structuring the strategy, running analysis on large datasets, sourcing hard-to-get US market data through primary research, and presenting findings to US clients and sponsors.

Requirements:

6+ years of experience with a strong consulting background - strategy, commercial, or deal advisory - and industry experience in waste management, or the broader environmental-services or industrials sectors.

Technical capabilities:

- Strategy: Structures ambiguous problems cleanly; builds a defensible thesis

- M&A: Screens and ranks targets; sizes markets; frames buy-and-build and value-creation logic

- Analytics: Turns large, messy data into decisions; comfortable in Excel/SQL and structured modeling

- US client presentation: Executive presence with US audiences; clear storyline

- US primary research: Gets difficult-to-get US data by going to source