Senior Coastal Engineer

Environmental Science Associates (ESA) is a 100% employee‑owned environmental consulting firm. We plan, design, permit, mitigate, and restore for projects across our communities, infrastructure systems, open spaces, and wildlands. We are 50 years strong in 21 offices across California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southeast United States.

Environmental Science Associates (ESA) seeks a Senior Coastal Engineer to provide leadership for ESA’s coastal engineering and resilience practice across California and beyond. We are looking for a proven leader with 15+ years of work experience, a passion for coastal processes, coastal hazards, engineering with nature, sea‑level rise, and resilience planning, and the desire to help lead, grow, and mentor our top‑notch coastal engineering group.

This is a leadership role at the forefront of coastal resilience—spanning coastal hazards analysis, adaptation planning, and implementation—while delivering high‑impact solutions.

• You are a professionally licensed engineer with 15+ years of experience leading coastal engineering projects, including expertise in nature‑based solutions, coastal resilience planning, coastal hazards analysis (waves, runup, erosion, and flooding) as well as flood management along the U.S. Pacific Coast and beyond.
• You have led and managed complex coastal engineering projects from concept through construction, including coastal hazards and vulnerability assessments, engineering evaluations, and erosion/flooding studies, technical reports, design plan sets, specifications, cost estimates (PS&E packages), construction schedules, and/or construction support.
• You are adept in the engineering steps required to move projects from concept to construction bid package, including coordination with multidisciplinary teams such as geotechnical, structural, and hydraulic engineers as well as coastal planners and landscape architects.
• You have provided senior engineer review and oversight on large‑scale coastal engineering projects, with an emphasis on Living Shorelines, nature‑based solutions and multi‑benefit flood and erosion protection, and have experience integrating coastal engineering with planning, economics, and resilience strategy development.
• You have led, managed, mentored, and/or supervised multi‑disciplinary design and engineering teams including delegating and guiding engineers through simple to complex tasks. You are an effective communicator who fosters teamwork and inclusion, and shares knowledge and expertise with more junior staff through mentoring and direct supervision.
• You have a Bachelor’s degree or higher in coastal engineering or a closely related discipline and a Professional Engineers license in California, Washington, and/or Oregon.

• As a senior leader, contribute to annual and long‑term strategic planning for our coastal engineering and coastal resilience practice. Cultivate best practices, facilitate knowledge sharing and technical training, mentor and manage more junior staff, develop and oversee implementation of engineering QA/QC protocols specific to coastal engineering and analysis, help manage workflow and work plans and make staffing and recruitment recommendations.
• Identify opportunities, track markets and clients and lead strategy to link and leverage resilience/sea‑level rise planning with ESA’s coastal sciences and engineering expertise.
• Leverage ESA’s multi‑disciplinary practices across regions to help connect, integrate, drive and expand our teams’ demonstrated capabilities in coastal hazards analysis, coastal resilience planning, and sea‑level rise adaptation firm‑wide.
• Collaborate with other engineers, coastal planners, hydrologists, geomorphologists, landscape architects, ecologists, biologists, economists, and other specialists in advancing coastal engineering, resilience planning and habitat restoration approaches and other project solutions from concept to implementation.
• Help plan, design and/or manage a wide array of important, challenging and exciting projects – leading efforts from coastal risk assessment through implementation – including coastal hazards assessments (such…