Lead Mechanical & Piping Project Engineer
Location: Olen, Belgium (approximately 40 kilometers northeast of Antwerp city)Start Date: ASAP
Contract Type: Annually Renewable Assignment (Long-term collaboration envisaged)
Work Schedule: Monday - Friday, Full-time, with 2 days remote work per week
Project Description
As Lead Project Engineer, you will act as the technical leader of multidisciplinary CAPEX projects. You will safeguard the coherence and quality of technical solutions, steer design decisions and interfaces, and represent the client in dealings with engineering partners, suppliers, and contractors. You will be the Project Manager's technical counterpart, helping to deliver installations that are safe, reliable, maintainable, and technically feasible.
This role requires a strong technical foundation in Mechanical & Piping. You will assess and challenge equipment and piping concepts, while maintaining a multidisciplinary overview and considering the technical impact on other disciplines (civil and E&I), as well as the impact on schedule, costs, and project risks. Throughout the project lifecycle, you will remain closely involved in technical choices, engineering quality, and their translation into execution.
- Technical impact: Directly influence design choices that determine safety, reliability, maintenance, and long-term performance.
- Owner-side responsibility: Represent the client and provide technical direction to internal and external engineering teams.
- Mechanical & Piping as a technical foundation: Use your expertise in equipment and piping as your core discipline.
- From concept to realization: Remain involved as ideas evolve into designs, construction, and operational installations.
- Complex industrial environment: Work on multidisciplinary projects within an operational site where engineering, production, and project execution come together.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and safeguard the project's technical basis, design philosophy, scope, and battery limits.
- Lead and integrate engineering across disciplines, with a focus on Mechanical & Piping (M&P), including process, E&I, automation, civil, safety, and infrastructure.
- Organize design reviews and assess designs for safety, compliance, functionality, reliability, maintainability, constructability, and lifecycle value from a TCO perspective.
- Translate process and project requirements into robust Mechanical & Piping concepts and safeguard the quality of layouts, P&IDs, equipment specifications, piping classifications, piping routes, and isometrics.
- Assess various technical solutions for feasibility, safety, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
- Direct and challenge EPCm partners, suppliers, and contractors on technical content, quality, schedule, and completeness of deliverables.
- Organize technical decision-making, make assumptions and deviations visible, and ensure traceable decisions and actions.
- Identify technical and project risks and assess the impact of choices and changes on scope, schedule, costs, execution, and business continuity.
- Support technical specifications, tender packages, bid evaluations, supplier selections, and contractual technical clarifications.
- For Mechanical & Piping, follow up fabrication, inspections, FAT, delivery, installation, SAT, and punch lists through to mechanical completion where relevant.
- Provide engineering support during construction, pre-commissioning, commissioning, start-up, and handover.
- Support the Project Manager with clear technical recommendations and transparent reporting to stakeholders.
- Coach engineers and contribute to standards, methods, lessons learned, and knowledge sharing within Project Engineering.
Technical Profile Requirements
- Master's degree in a technical field, or equivalent level through demonstrable experience. A degree in electromechanics or chemical technology is preferred.
- Extensive experience in technical design and engineering in an industrial or process environment, with specialist knowledge of Mechanical & Piping engineering within the process industry or a heavy industrial environment.
- Experience with multidisciplinary CAPEX projects from concept through execution and completion.
- Ability to provide technical direction to engineering partners, suppliers, and contractors and critically assess their deliverables.
- Familiarity with relevant standards and good engineering practices for Mechanical & Piping, such as PED, ATEX, and EN 13480.
- VCA-VOL certificate required, or willingness to obtain it before the assignment starts.
- Knowledge of AutoCAD Plant 3D is an asset.
- Ability to work with project controls: scope, schedule, costs, risks, changes, and stakeholder management.
Non-Technical Profile Requirements
- Combine technical depth with a broad overview, decisiveness, and pragmatic problem-solving skills across all disciplines.
- Ability to explain complex technical topics clearly.
- Work in a structured, independent, and results-oriented manner, demonstrating clear ownership.
- Fluent communication in Dutch and professional proficiency in English.
Language Skills
- Fluent in Dutch
- Fluent in English
- Other languages are an asset
Additional Information
- 100% onsite presence required
- Long-term collaboration envisaged