Principal Fire Engineer

Overview

Join as our new Principal Fire Engineer. This is a hybrid role that can be based in our Edinburgh, Manchester, Bath, Leeds, or London office.

Our fire engineering team has a global reach with offices in the UK, Dubai, and Riyadh. We work across all sectors, delivering new builds, refurbishments, technical services, and expert witness work, and we champion industry best practice through in‑house computational expertise and close collaboration with architects.

• Lead and project‑manage fire engineering projects.
• Inform and support the building design aspirations, functionality and architectural form throughout the design process.
• Take ownership of client care and general consultancy, including financial performance, invoicing and monitoring.
• Represent Buro Happold Fire Engineering at design team meetings, both internal and external.
• Identify and specify appropriate fixed fire protection systems, such as automatic detection and/or suppression.
• Carry out and review fire engineering calculations, including smoke modelling and evacuation analysis from hand calculations to complex 3D CFD.
• Guide, mentor and technically review the work of senior and junior team members.
• Proactively contribute to innovation, tool development and improvement of methods, supporting the evolution of the Fire Engineer discipline.

• Experience as a lead fire engineer on projects.
• Higher education qualification in engineering or a fire safety related subject.
• Professional experience delivering fire and life safety designs for UK projects.
• Track record of gaining agreement for prescriptive and performance‑based design solutions from approving authorities.
• Experience mentoring and developing junior engineers.

• Hybrid working arrangements.
• Attractive salary and benefits, including life assurance and income protection.
• Private medical insurance.
• Holiday entitlement of 25 days, with flexible arrangements and birthday off.
• Generous company pension scheme.
• Flexible benefits: cycle scheme, dental and optical insurance, travel insurance, season ticket loans, corporate discounts.
• Enhanced parental leave policies.
• 3pm finish on the last Friday of the month.
• Commitment to continuous development: learning programmes, professional memberships, wellbeing activities.
• A supportive and inclusive environment that welcomes diverse identities and encourages innovation.

Buro Happold is an equal‑opportunity employer. We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion and actively encourage applications from under‑represented groups.