Department Manager - Offshore Structural Engineering

About the Role

This position leads offshore structural engineering delivery for concept, FEED, and detailed design phases. The role covers the analysis and design of topsides, jackets, and related substructures, with responsibility for making sure work is completed safely, follows the right codes and standards, aligns with contractual obligations, and stays within approved time and cost limits.

The role also includes guiding team members, supporting their development, and ensuring the discipline delivers engineering output in line with company expectations.

Key Responsibilities

Technical leadership

• Oversee structural engineers, designers, and project-assigned structural drafting/design staff, while maintaining strong technical capability through coaching, mentoring, training, and peer review.
• Plan structural resource needs across projects and manage team mobilization and demobilization to keep staffing effective and cost-efficient.
• Protect the integrity of structural design work and uphold discipline standards, procedures, templates, and guidance. Assess and manage structural software and tools that improve delivery, including digital methods that reduce manual work.
• Strengthen communication and collaboration between structural teams and other disciplines.
• Ensure all work meets quality, safety, environmental, and security requirements, including safe design practices and change management.
• Control structural engineering delivery against budget and schedule, and help project teams implement corrective actions when problems occur.
• Review emerging technologies and industry developments against current standards, update practices when suitable, and benchmark design and drafting methods to identify efficiency and cost improvements.
• Encourage cost-saving, productivity, and value-add initiatives, and prepare progress and spending updates when needed.
• Support career growth and performance management through KPIs, skill-gap reviews, hiring input, and resource planning.

Project execution

• Contribute to project execution planning as needed, including discipline work-hour estimates and support for schedules and budgets.
• Promote creative approaches, new technologies, and methods that help address out-of-sequence work and delivery constraints.
• Coordinate with project management to resolve issues affecting staffing, scope, progress, schedule, completion, or profitability.
• Review and approve work completed by direct reports and delegated reviewers, while keeping workloads at a manageable level.

Business operations

• Take part in budgeting and manage the discipline within budget, including planning, approving, and controlling expenses in line with company policy.
• Manage staffing levels and organizational setup for the discipline, and ensure adequate coverage when resources change.
• Develop and maintain discipline procedures, templates, guidelines, and standard deliverables, while making sure mentoring and training obligations are met.
• Handle the employee performance review process and contribute to dispute resolution when required. Ensure all team activities meet health, safety, environmental, and security requirements.

Business development support

• Support business development by maintaining CVs and capability profiles, and by tracking current and future capability needs.
• Build strong working relationships with clients, vendors, and contractors, and support networking, negotiation, strategic partnerships, and cost-saving efforts where relevant.
• Maintain discipline benchmarking and contribute to proposals by defining execution strategy, estimating or checking costs, drafting proposal content, and presenting to customers; may lead part or all of a proposal.

Safety and people leadership

• Take direct responsibility for implementing company HSE requirements and driving safe, sustainable engineering outcomes across the asset lifecycle through SEAL.
• Demonstrate a strong commitment to personal well-being and ongoing improvement in health, safety, and environmental performance.

Working style and decision-making

• Build constructive business relationships across the organization with clear, tactful, and consistent communication.
• Work effectively in a small, high-performing team with visibility to senior stakeholders and multiple interfaces.
• Stay results-focused, manage deadlines, handle complexity, and make thoughtful discipline decisions under the direction of the Location Director of Engineering.
• Own discipline planning, budgeting, expenditure approvals, and resource mobilization/demobilization, while driving continuous improvement and accountability for team performance and risk.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Civil or Structural Engineering from an accredited university.
• Leadership and project execution training.
• Professional license or chartership with a recognised engineering body.
• Willingness to obtain local engineering accreditation within the probationary period if not already held; this is mandatory.
• Strong knowledge of structural engineering practice, relevant regulations, codes, fabrication/manufacturing standards, and industry methods.
• Practical understanding of offshore structural analysis for pre-service conditions such as loadout, lift, transportation, launch/flotation, and on-bottom stability, as well as in-service conditions such as in-place, seismic, fatigue, and pushover.
• Broad knowledge of structural analysis topics including dynamic loading and resistance, collapse analysis, spectral fatigue, fire and explosion design, reliability-based analysis, and dropped object analysis where applicable.
• Ability to produce practical, construction-friendly, and cost-effective structural connection and support details.
• Significant senior-level experience in the energy sector, including management of large structural engineering and design teams.
• Competence with Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, and PowerPoint.
• Ability to organize and retain information from multiple sources in the required format and in line with policies.
• Working knowledge of discipline tools and awareness of how tools, analytics, modeling, and cross-discipline data-centric methods connect.
• At least 15 years of design experience in Oil & Gas, including leadership of structural engineers and designers; overall experience may be around 20 years with strong exposure to concept, FEED, and detailed design.
• Strong budgeting and cost-control capability.

Additional Information

The organization is a global professional services company working across energy, chemicals, and resources. It supports customers over the full asset lifecycle and is focused on the transition toward lower-carbon energy while continuing to meet current energy, chemical, and resource needs.

The workplace is committed to diversity, inclusion, and respect, and provides equal employment opportunity without discrimination based on legally protected characteristics. The culture emphasizes belonging, collaboration, innovation, reskilling, and use of transferable skills to support the shift toward low-carbon energy infrastructure and technology.

Applicants joining this environment are expected to help drive sustainable impact, broaden their experience, and contribute to meaningful change.