Marine Structures & Hydrodynamics Engineer

Industries: Engineering, Infrastructure, Maritime, Ports

Flexible, part-time, remote working – 20 hours per month

Services for equity arrangement

Start and onboard immediately

Evolves to a paid role upon closing our next capital raise

We are seeking an experienced engineer with a strong background in marine structural analysis and hydrodynamics to lead the continued maturation of our in-house engineering analysis capability for multi-body floating systems. You will take ownership of the analytical methods that underpin how we design, verify and optimise connections between floating structures across a wide range of environmental conditions, from sheltered inland waters through to open-ocean exposure. The work sits squarely at the intersection of hydrodynamics, offshore structural engineering, fatigue mechanics, and marine systems design. This is a senior technical role for someone who has done this type of analysis at depth, wants to shape how it is done next, and is comfortable driving engineering rigour through every stage from first-principles derivation to classification-submission standard.

The Engineering Challenge

Multi-body floating structures are at the frontier of marine engineering. The connections between floating bodies carry the load differentials, absorb the relative motions, and ultimately govern whether the system survives its design life. These interfaces are where hydrodynamics, structural mechanics, fatigue, and operational safety intersect, and where the engineering margins are hardest won. The analytical methods for these systems are not yet fully standardised. Every step forward requires equal parts physics, engineering judgment, and careful computational implementation. This role is about advancing those methods, extending them to cover more complex configurations, improving their fidelity, and ensuring the resulting designs can be defended to classification societies and regulators.

What you will own:

• Advance the analytical methodology for multi-body floating systems - moving from single-design simplifications to per-interface optimisation, handling mixed-geometry arrays with non-identical body response, and incorporating orientation-dependent environmental loading.
• Extend structural assessment coverage across limit states — ultimate, fatigue, serviceability, and accidental - aligned with DNV, Eurocode, BS, API, ISO and classification society requirements.
• Deepen the hydrodynamic model - shallow-water corrections, spectral fatigue using wave scatter diagrams, relative motion under non-identical RAOs, bilinear S-N methodology, and where appropriate probabilistic reliability assessment.
• Expand the design envelope across material families and connection concepts - carbon and high-strength steels, stainless and duplex alloys, marine aluminium, with family-specific safety, corrosion, and fatigue frameworks.
• Validate outputs against finite element analysis, physical model test data, and published benchmarks, maintaining full traceability between every calculation and its governing engineering basis.
• Work alongside naval architects, hydrodynamicists, and structural engineers - taking upstream stability and response outputs as inputs, feeding downstream detailed design and classification submissions.
• Document methodology to a standard suitable for third-party technical review, classification society approval, and regulatory submission.
• Contribute to the technical direction of where our analysis capability needs to go next.

Essential:

• Academic: Degree in Naval Architecture, Offshore Engineering, Structural Engineering, Marine Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Postgraduate: Postgraduate qualification (MSc or PhD) in hydrodynamics, floating structures, offshore engineering, or structural dynamics preferred.
• Industry: Minimum 10 years working on marine structures with substantive exposure to hydrodynamic response analysis. Candidates may come from offshore energy (oil and gas, offshore wind), naval architecture, marine civil engineering, floating bridges, or port and harbour infrastructure.
• Standards: Working fluency with DNV-OS-C101, DNV-RP-C203, DNV-RP-C205, Eurocode 3, BS 6349 series, API RP 2SK, ISO 19901. Comfortable interpreting classification society requirements and defending design decisions to surveyors.
• Hydrodynamics: Strong grasp of response amplitude operators, wave-structure interaction, relative motion analysis, and stochastic loading. Practical experience with at least one commercial hydrodynamic package such as OrcaFlex, AQWA, WAMIT, or equivalent.
• Fatigue: Demonstrable capability with fatigue assessment under variable-amplitude loading, S-N methodology, hot-spot stress evaluation, and cumulative damage frameworks.
• Computation: Comfort with quantitative engineering computation — whether through advanced spreadsheet work, MATLAB, Python, or similar. The ability to translate engineering theory into verifiable computational methods is essential.
• Documentation: Proven ability to produce engineering documentation of classification-submission standard.

Desirable:

• Experience with multi-objective optimisation, Pareto analysis, or design-of-experiments methodologies applied to structural or marine systems design.
• Familiarity with Monte Carlo reliability analysis, probabilistic structural assessment, or partial factor calibration.
• Background in ship-structure interaction, berthing energy assessment, or PIANC wake modelling.
• Exposure to floating renewable energy platforms, floating urban infrastructure, or articulated multi-body marine systems.
• Experience contributing to joint industry projects, classification society guidance development, or technical standards committees.