About the Role
The Senior Planning Engineer works within the consultant's project controls team, acting on behalf of the client to oversee the planning and schedule performance of the contractors delivering a multi-contract rail programme in the UAE. The role involves reviewing and accepting contractor programmes, monitoring and verifying progress, maintaining an integrated programme-level view across all contracts, and providing independent assessments of schedule variances, delays, and extension of time claims. Additionally, this position offers the client clear, concise, and executive-level insights into the programme status, critical path, and schedule risk.
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Key Responsibilities
Contractor Programme Review and Acceptance
- Review contractors' baseline programmes for compliance with contract requirements, including key dates, milestones, sectional completion, WBS structure, logic, resource loading, and constraints, and recommend acceptance or rejection with clear, documented comments.
- Review and challenge EPC schedule logic, float use, critical path integrity, and durations, ensuring programmes are realistic and fit for use in progress monitoring and delay assessment.
- Review contractors' revised programmes, recovery programmes, and monthly updates, ensuring changes are properly justified and do not conceal delay or float manipulation.
- Specify and enforce planning requirements, such as WBS, coding structure, update procedures, and submission formats, to ensure reporting is consistent across all contracts.
Integrated Programme Management
- Develop and maintain the integrated master programme, combining all contractor programmes with design, authority approvals, third-party works, and client-side activities.
- Identify and manage interfaces and dependencies between contracts (civil, trackwork, rail systems, stations, depots), highlighting cross-contract risks to the critical path early.
- Assess how delays on one contract affect the others and the overall programme completion date.
Progress Monitoring and Verification
- Independently verify contractor-reported progress through site inspections, measurement records, design deliverable status, and procurement tracking.
- Agree on progress measurement methods and rules of credit with contractors and hold them to it.
- Track schedule performance using Earned Value Management (EVM), including SPI and CPI, earned value, planned value, and forecast trends and relate it to cost and payment performance.
Reporting to the Client
- Prepare weekly and monthly progress reports and presentations for the client, summarizing status, key issues, critical path movement, risks, and recommended actions at an executive level.
- Produce programme dashboards, S-curves, milestone trackers, and look-ahead summaries across all contracts.
- Present schedule findings in progress meetings and hold contractors accountable for slippage and recovery commitments.
Variance, Delay and Claims Assessment
- Identify and investigate schedule variances, determine root causes, and instruct or request recovery measures from contractors.
- Independently assess contractors' extension of time (EOT) claims and time impact analyses (TIAs), and prepare the Engineer's assessment.
- Assess the time effect of variations, instructions, and change requests before they are issued, ensuring the client understands the schedule consequences of its decisions.
- Keep independent schedule records to support the client's position in claims and disputes.
Scope and Change Control
- Support scope control and change management across the programme, ensuring approved changes are properly reflected in contractor programmes and the integrated master programme.
- Interpret drawings, specifications, and contract documents to verify that contractor programmes reflect the full contracted scope.
Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor's degree in civil engineering, Construction Management, or a related discipline.
- At least 10 years of planning and scheduling experience on major infrastructure projects, with experience on rail, metro, or light rail projects.
- Advanced proficiency in Primavera P6.
- Proven experience assessing EOT claims and TIAs, and applying delay analysis methods.
- Strong working knowledge of FIDIC contracts, particularly in relation to programme, progress, delay, and claims provisions.
- Solid understanding of CPM scheduling, WBS, progress measurement, and EVM.
- Experience with UAE or GCC rail projects, such as Etihad Rail or Dubai Metro.
- Experienced in multi-contract programmes and interface management.
- Familiarity with schedule risk analysis tools and Power BI reporting.
Additional Information
- All newly hired employees are required to attend an in-person Day 1 onboarding at an office location as a condition of employment.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits may include medical, dental, vision, life, AD&D, disability benefits, paid time off, leaves of absence, voluntary benefits, perks, flexible work options, well-being resources, employee assistance program, business travel insurance, service recognition awards, retirement savings plan, and employee stock purchase plan.
Working Model
