Senior Consultant, Emerging Technologies and Defense

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