Advising clients on how to characterize, manage, and clean up contaminated sites, you design remediation approaches, oversee field work, and negotiate cleanup with regulators. Often billable consulting at an environmental engineering firm.
A typical week tends to mix field oversight, design work, and client and agency conversations — reviewing the day's sampling results, sketching a treatment-train option for a difficult groundwater plume, prepping a draft work plan for state review. You're often balancing technical defensibility with the client's budget and timeline. Billable hours, milestones, and reports are the operating measures.
The harder part is often the open-endedness of remediation — every site has unique geology, history, and contaminant chemistry, and the right answer takes time to converge on. Variance across employers is wide: large consultancies offer deep specialty support; boutiques and small firms expect you to be a generalist across investigation, design, and oversight.
People who tend to thrive here have technical depth, defensible writing, and the patience for long cleanup arcs. PE, PG, or state-specific cleanup credentials anchor seniority. The trade-off is deadline-driven evenings and the constant background hum of utilization targets at consulting firms.
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Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
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View all Business Operations roles →Advising clients on how to characterize, manage, and clean up contaminated sites, you design remediation approaches, oversee field work, and negotiate cleanup with regulators. Often billable consulting at an environmental engineering firm.
Median pay for an Environmental Remediation Consultant is about $137K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $69K to $228K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Complex Problem Solving, Speaking, Critical Thinking, Monitoring, and Coordination.
Most people in this role hold a bachelor's degree.
Employment in this field is projected to grow about 4.5% through 2034, with roughly 630,980 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Senior Environmental Remediation Consultant, Environmental Remediation Specialist, and Remediation Project Engineer.
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