"I joined Atkins in 2006 in Epsom as a senior geotechnical engineer, having worked for 8 years in India and Middle East, both with contractors and consultants. Straight after joining Atkins, I was part of large multidisciplinary project team based in central London designing the Hybrid bill design options for Portals and Shafts for Crossrail. This project provided me a great opportunity to work with Industry experts in Underground Station and tunnel design. The geotechnical team on this project was one of the first in the industry to apply the concepts of Eurocode 7 i.e. use of partial factors in the design of embedded retaining walls – long before it became mandatory in 2010.

On returning to my home office in Epsom, I was given an opportunity to work on one of Atkins’ most prestigious projects. I was part of the London2012 Olympic Park infrastructure design team, leading a team responsible for the assessment and design of over 6km of existing and new river walls within the Olympic Park. This provided me with experience of the complete design-and-build lifecycle, from preliminary design to construction stage. I was privileged to be part of Atkins’ Olympics team and selected this project for my professional review with ICE.

With the opportunities provided by Atkins and support from my supervising civil engineer within the Ground Engineering team, I became a Chartered Engineer within three years of joining Atkins and living in the UK, which was a great achievement for my professional career.

In 2009, I was offered the opportunity to take the role of Team leader for the rail geotechnics team in Croydon, which I grabbed with both hands. This role provided an opportunity to play a range of roles on major infrastructure projects, Contractor’s Responsible Engineer, discipline lead and project manager for our biggest client Network Rail. My biggest achievement of my tenure in Croydon team was application of innovative solution to a complex constraint site with a live Network Rail infrastructure to achieve the best solution for the client. I used bi-directional pile testing (Osterberg method) which had not been used in the UK rail industry before, and this was subsequently commended by the Emap Ground Engineering Awards 2011 in the “Technical Excellence” category. I was also awarded an Atkins Ground Engineering award for innovation.

More recently I was offered an opportunity to go on long term secondment (2 years) to lead and develop a team in our Global Design Centre as Head of Ground Engineering, Bangalore. I was successful in growing and developing the team from a team of 8 engineers to a team 25 geotechnical and tunnel engineers, which provided me experience of working as discipline lead and technical reviewer on projects around the world.

Currently, I am working on a major rail project East West Rail Phase 2, managing a team of more than 55 engineers and geologists.

Atkins is a fantastic company to work with where you can develop both your technical and management skills. I feel trusted and valued, and I’ve accepted responsibility with open arms. Throughout my career I’ve had varied and interesting challenges and great career progression."