Principal Consultant — Upstream

Purpose of the Role

You are the person who brings domain expertise to the room, both internally and externally. You can turn what a client means into something our developers can build correctly. You carry the domain credibility of WhiteSpace in front of senior technical counterparts at major operators, and you carry it inward to the developers who build against your judgement.

What you bring

• Domain authority in client engagements. Hold substantive engineering conversations with the client’s senior technical people. Decipher what they need, structure it, and identify where value lies. Be trusted with the problem behind the request;
• Day-to-day translation. Turn business and engineering intent into technical specifications the delivery team can build against, and turn what the team builds back into language the client recognises. This is the core of the job;
• Technical direction for a small team. Frame the problem, agree the approach with the developers on your engagements, review what comes back, and hold the quality bar on domain correctness;
• Delivery discipline. Realistic timelines. Commitments that are met. Clients kept updated. Actions tracked and closed. As we take on new clients who do not share years of history with us, this is what the relationship rests on;
• Coaching on domain and client craft. Coach our consultants with technical engagements, and let them understand what good looks like in an upstream engineering organisation;
• Spotting value. Identify where a client would get more from what we do, and bring in commercial to take it forward.

Position in the organisation:

• Clients. Accountable for domain quality and technical credibility in your engagements;
• Innovation & Account Lead. You report here. Technical direction of the account portfolio, and the internal home for domain craft;
• Senior partner for client engagements. Client strategy, roadmap and the multi-year relationship sit here, with a founding partner who remains engaged with these accounts. You are the daily domain weight underneath that, and the two are designed to work as a pair;
• Sales Lead. Runs new-logo sales and diversification; you feed that funnel from the substance of the work, and receive accounts from it as they mature;
• Tech Lead. Platform direction, technical feasibility and team allocation; you set the domain direction, they resource it.

Profile:

• Domain depth. A senior upstream engineering background in Subsurface, Drilling & Wells, Field Development and/or Front End Project Delivery. You have carried development concepts through stage gates, owned cost and schedule estimates, and sat through reviews;
• Technical breadth across the concept. You bring an integrator’s mindset and are able to have meaningful client conversations across the upstream value chain, from wells and completion, to geology, reservoir engineering, flowlines and pipelines, subsea and surface facilities - enough to see how a decision in one of them moves the others. Affinity with decommissioning or production operations is a plus as our project portfolio matures;
• Client credibility. Earned trust with senior technical counterparts at major operators - people who will tell you what they actually think because they know you will understand;
• Interest in technology. At home in AI and software delivery teams, without needing to build software yourself;
• How you work. Clients tell you the real problem, not the sanitised version. You know when to push back and when to lean in. You chase quality and notice when something is off before the client does. And you have a customer-support mindset: the relationship is built on what you deliver, not what you propose.

Terms & Conditions:

• This is a staff position, based in The Netherlands;
• We offer a hybrid work environment and trust you can balance remote & office work;
• Fluent English required; Norwegian language or experience working in Norway is a plus; willingness to travel as the relationships require;
• Base salary ~€120k/y + holiday and pension contribution;
• We have an annual profit-sharing scheme dependent on company performance, individual delivery, and alignment with company values;
• We also intend to offer equity participation as part of our commitment to sharing in the company's future success.

Why Join WhiteSpace?

• Most senior upstream engineers who move toward technology end up further from the engineering, not closer to it: running accounts, running people, and running slides. This role is built the other way round: it keeps a technical person in the technical work, with a small team of top developers building against their judgement, on systems that operators actually use to make decisions. If the interesting part of your career has been the problem rather than the org chart, this is a seat designed around that.

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