Following graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison he taught at Michigan State University in East Lansing, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Towards the end of the 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. He was the first editor of the Wisconsin Sociologist 1960-62, then again in 1965-70. In 1963 Engelmann was president of the Wisconsin Sociological Association. He appeared in "Who’s Who in America " in 1989. He is named in Austrian Social Scientists in Exile 1933-1945.