Community manager

Thornton Tomasetti applies engineering and scientific principles to solve the world’s challenges. An independent organization of creative thinkers and innovative doers collaborating from offices worldwide, our mission is to bring our clients' ideas to life and, in the process, lay the groundwork for a better, more resilient future. We provide support and opportunities to our employees to achieve their full potential and cultivate a rewarding career.

Thornton Tomasetti’s Communities of Practice (CoPs) are firmwide, grassroots communities organized around technical and nontechnical topics that connect people across offices and practices, capture and spread knowledge, develop best practices, solve problems, cultivate innovation, and build leadership capability. We currently have approximately 40+ CoPs spanning technical disciplines and business topics, operating primarily through Spark (our internal knowledge sharing platform, built on LumApps), Microsoft Teams, and associated SharePoint spaces.

Your Role

The Community Manager will serve as the central operator, facilitator, and curator for the CoP program. Reporting into the Director, Knowledge & Data within CORE Studio/Information Technology, this role will design and run our CoP ecosystem: supporting leaders, strengthening participation, turning conversations into durable knowledge, coordinating funding and logistics, and ensuring that CoP participation remains a key component of what it means to be an employee at Thornton Tomasetti.

This is a firmwide, cross-practice role suited to someone who enjoys working with subject-matter experts, building communities in a decentralized environment, and translating Community activities into visible impact on learning, innovation, and staff development. Thornton Tomasetti is a technology-forward company with longstanding use of AI as well as a track record of attracting employees who love to innovate and share.

What You'll Do

Community Strategy and Governance

• Develop and maintain a firmwide CoP strategy aligned with TT’s business and knowledge-management priorities, in partnership with the Director, Knowledge & Data, Practice Leaders, and other stakeholders.
• Own and maintain the CoP operating model so that CoPs remain self-organizing and grassroots while operating within clear expectations for purpose, scope, behavior, and business relevance.
• Define and administer lightweight governance for CoP creation, dormancy, and retirement; role expectations for CoP Leaders, co-leaders, and core teams; content ownership and review cycles; and escalation paths for issues beyond a single CoP.
• Maintain a single authoritative roster of active and dormant CoPs, leaders, co-leaders, and sponsors.

Leader Enablement and Community Health

• Support a portfolio of approximately 40+ CoPs across technical and business topics, ensuring that each has a clear purpose, basic operating rhythm, and annually refreshed goals connected to TT’s strategy and client work.
• Run regular one-on-one or small-group check-ins with CoP Leaders to clarify priorities, identify obstacles and resource needs, coach on facilitation and inclusion, and support succession.
• Help relaunch or sunset communities that have gone dormant or no longer have a clear purpose.
• Manage the leader transition process, including coordination with Office Directors on workload approvals, and handover between outgoing and incoming leaders.
• Design and deliver an annual CoP Leaders’ Summit and periodic cross-CoP forums to build leadership capability, share practices, and surface cross-cutting opportunities and risks.

Participation, Engagement, and Communications

• Increase awareness and participation in CoPs across offices, practices, regions, and career stages, including more consistent engagement of remote and international staff.
• Develop and run CoP-focused communications and marketing campaigns that highlight upcoming sessions, funded initiatives, outputs, and impact stories.
• Partner with Internal Communications, Learning & Organizational Development, CORE, and Practice leadership to integrate CoP activities into training, onboarding, project-management practices, and external thought leadership where appropriate.

Knowledge Capture, Content Curation, and Tools

• Help CoPs turn discussions into durable, discoverable knowledge, including recaps, playbooks, checklists, templates, training modules, curated resource lists, and links to relevant tools and research.
• Establish and reinforce clear ecosystem roles among Spark (LumApps), Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Glean, and other tools so that conversations, working collaboration, durable content, and enterprise search are used appropriately.
• Coordinate content governance for CoP spaces by defining ownership, implementing review and expiration rules, cleaning up stale content, and consolidating duplicative resources.
• Support CoP-driven experiments and tooling pilots, ensuring that outcomes and lessons learned are documented and reusable.

Program Operations, Budgeting, and Metrics

• Administer the CoP funding and task-based budgeting processes, including forms, guidance, proposal support, review coordination, approvals, and transparent status tracking.
• Maintain core CoP program artifacts, including trackers for communities, leaders, events, membership, budgets, awards, and funded initiatives.
• Define and monitor practical measures of CoP health and impact, such as active membership, participation trends, cross-office collaboration, knowledge outputs, contributions to standards or project practices, innovation pilots, onboarding, and staff development.
• Provide periodic reporting and recommendations to the Director, Knowledge & Data and other stakeholders on the state of CoPs, emerging needs, risks, and opportunities.
• Continuously refine the CoP operating model based on data, leader and member feedback, and external benchmarking.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, architecture, information science, communications, organizational learning, business, or a related field; equivalent professional experience will be considered.
• Five or more years of experience in community management, knowledge management, learning and development, professional-services operations, or a related area, ideally in a knowledge-intensive environment.
• Demonstrated experience building and sustaining communities, networks, or cross-functional programs in a decentralized organization, such as Communities of Practice, Centers of Excellence, councils, guilds, or similar groups.
• Proven ability to work effectively with senior technical professionals and subject-matter experts, influencing without relying solely on formal authority.
• Experience helping experts translate tacit knowledge into clear, actionable content such as playbooks, guidance, training, case studies, or standards.
• Strong writing, editing, facilitation, presentation, and storytelling skills for technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Experience with collaboration and knowledge platforms such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, intranets (LumApps), and enterprise search/generative AI (Glean); ability to quickly learn TT’s specific ecosystem and workflows.
• Strong organizational and project-management skills, including the ability to manage multiple communities, workstreams, and budgets across time zones.
• Ability to use participation data, surveys, and qualitative feedback to evaluate effectiveness and prioritize improvements.
• Collaborative, curious, and service-oriented, with a track record of enabling culture change around knowledge sharing or learning.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced environment and balancing structure with the grassroots, volunteer-driven nature of CoPs.

Preferred

• Previous experience in architecture, engineering, construction, or consulting, or in another global, project-based, technical organization.
• Experience with knowledge-management, Communities of Practice, or learning-organization frameworks.
• Familiarity with basic data and reporting tools, such as Excel, Power BI, or similar, to build and maintain lightweight dashboards or trackers for CoP activity and impact.

Compensation

The rate for this position generally is $85,000 - $100,000 annually. This range is a good faith estimate provided pursuant to the Illinois State Pay Transparency Law. It is based on what a successful Illinois State applicant might be paid and assumes that the successful candidate will be in Illinois State or perform the position from Illinois State. Similar positions located outside of Illinois State will not necessarily receive the same compensation. Actual pay rates may vary from the range, as permitted by Illinois Equal Pay Transparency Law. Compensation offers will be based on various factors, including operational needs, individual education, qualifications and experience, work location and comparison to employee already in the role, as well as other considerations permitted by law. A potential new employee’s pay history will not be used in compensation decisions.

Benefits

Depending on your employment status, benefits may include:

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, AD&D, Disability and other voluntary benefits
• Flexible Spending Accounts for Medical and Childcare
• Paid Time Off, Family Leave for New Parents, Volunteer Time
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Commuter Transit (where available)
• 401k retirement savings with Company matching on employee contributions and/or qualified student loan repayments
• Fitness Reimbursement
• And other various wellness, diversity/inclusion and employee resource programs and initiatives

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Thornton Tomasetti is proud to be an equal employment workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Thornton Tomasetti are considered without regards to age, ancestry, color, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, protected family care or medical leave status, race, religion (including beliefs and practices or the absence thereof), sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

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