Fourteen years of turning ambitious drawings into occupied buildings.

I started as a graduate structural engineer working on foundation design for a regional infrastructure consultancy, and the thing that stuck with me from those first years was how much the “engineering problem” on a live site is usually a logistics or communication problem wearing structural clothing.

That instinct followed me through port access works in Khor Fakkan, a five-tower mixed-use district in Sharjah, a cable-stayed crossing over a working shipping channel in Dubai, and now a multi-billion-dirham metro extension in Abu Dhabi. Each project taught me a different way that schedules actually slip — utility diversions nobody budgeted float for, commissioning sequences that assume systems will behave like their datasheets, marine windows that don’t care about your Gantt chart.

These days I split my time between program direction — the stage gates, the risk registers, the executive reporting that keeps a board calm — and staying close enough to the technical detail that I can still read a structural drawing and know when something is wrong before the RFI arrives. I think that combination is increasingly rare, and it’s the reason clients bring me in mid-project when something has gone quiet in the wrong way.

Outside delivery work, I mentor two junior engineers through a regional structural engineering association, and I’m currently leading a portfolio-wide net-zero retrofit programme across 42 public facilities — the first project in my career where the client success metric is a utility bill rather than a ribbon-cutting.