Water Resources Engineer
About The Position
RTI’s Water, Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Energy Solutions (WARES) Group is seeking a motivated Water Resources Engineer to support both our hydrology and flood risk and our Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) team. Across these complementary practice areas, we develop innovative models, analytical methods, and decision-support tools that help clients understand flood hazards, manage water systems, and make informed planning and operational decisions. Our flood risk work supports hydropower owners, dam safety programs, government agencies, and the broader water resources community through precipitation-frequency analysis, probable flood hazard assessments, unsteady hydraulic modeling, reservoir analysis, and downstream consequence analysis. Our IWRM work combines hydrologic and water-system operations modeling, geospatial and statistical analysis, and computational tool development to support integrated planning, resilient infrastructure, and sustainable management of river basins and shared water resources. The ideal candidate will bring a strong foundation in water resources engineering and an interest in applying programming, data analysis, and modeling across several of the areas described below; experience in every area is not required.
Requirements
- Demonstrated knowledge and experience in water resources engineering, hydrology, hydraulics, river-basin planning, or a closely related field.
- Experience applying quantitative methods to water resources problems, with relevant experience in one or more areas such as flood risk, hydrologic or hydraulic analysis, reservoir modeling, or integrated water resources planning.
- Ability to collect, quality-check, analyze, interpret, and document water resources data.
- Ability to use programming, scripting, spreadsheets, databases, GIS, or other computational tools for technical analysis.
- Ability to prepare clear technical documentation and communicate methods, assumptions, uncertainty, and results to technical and nontechnical audiences.
- Ability to work independently and collaboratively within multidisciplinary teams while managing multiple priorities.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States and not require future sponsorship for employment visa status.
Nice To Haves
- Deeper experience in flood risk, IWRM, computational methods, or a combination of these areas.
- Hydrologic modeling using continuous, event-based, snowmelt, probabilistic, or stochastic methods.
- Hydraulic modeling to support flood routing, flood-inundation analysis, dam or levee safety projects, consequence analysis, or flood-risk assessment.
- Reservoir, river-system, or large-scale water-system operations modeling, including rule-based operations and planning or management scenarios.
- Water-allocation modeling using MODSIM or similar river-basin planning and operations software to support green and gray infrastructure analysis, shared-basin applications, or decision-support systems.
- Calibration of hydrologic and other water resources models, including sensitivity analysis, uncertainty analysis, and evaluation of model performance.
- Water resources statistical analysis
- Experience with hydrologic or hydraulic models such as HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS, SAC-SMA, Snow-17, UBC, stochastic event flood models, or comparable platforms.
- Programming or scripting with Python, R, C#, VB.NET, or comparable languages.
- Geospatial analysis and mapping using ArcGIS, QGIS, or comparable tools.
- Relational databases and data management using SQL.
- Development of reproducible analytical workflows, graphical user interfaces, visualization dashboards, or tools such as Tableau or Power BI.
- Optimization, machine learning, scenario screening, or other advanced computational methods applied to water resources problems.
Responsibilities
- Support projects spanning flood risk analysis, hydrologic and hydraulic modeling, reservoir and river-system operations, and integrated water resources planning.
- Collaborate with engineers, scientists, and software developers to implement, test, document, and enhance RTI’s hydrologic, flood risk, and water resources planning tools.
- Collect, quality-check, analyze, and summarize hydrologic, meteorological, hydraulic, geospatial, infrastructure, and water-use data to support model development and decision analysis.
- Develop, calibrate, and apply hydrologic, hydraulic, reservoir, and river-system models for flood risk assessment and integrated water resources planning.
- Design and develop reproducible spreadsheets, scripts, databases, and visualization workflows that improve data management, model execution, quality control, and communication of results.
- Evaluate flood mitigation, reservoir operations, infrastructure, and watershed management alternatives under historical, extreme, and future hydrologic conditions.
- Prepare clear technical documentation, visualizations, and presentations that communicate methods, assumptions, uncertainty, and results to technical and nontechnical audiences.
- Lead small projects, task orders, or technical workstreams of moderate complexity by coordinating scope, schedule, budget, quality, and team contributions.
- Contribute to proposal strategy, technical approaches, scopes of work, staffing plans, budgets, and selected sections of larger proposals.
- Build scientific and professional stature by sharing project methods and findings through internal presentations, client briefings, technical publications, and conference presentations or papers.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary
- Generous paid time off policy
- Merit based annual increases
- Bonus opportunities
- Robust recognition program
- Competitive range of insurance plans (including health, dental, life, and short-term and long-term disability)
- Access to a retirement savings program such as a 401(k) plan
- Paid parental leave for all parents
- Financial assistance with adoption expenses or infertility treatments
- Financial reimbursement for education and developmental opportunities
- Employee assistance program
- Numerous other offerings to support a healthy work-life balance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
