CIVIL ENGINEER - DIRECT HIRE AUTHORITY at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — Chicago, IL

FERC's dam-safety mission looks similar to Reclamation's on the surface — both involve hydroelectric infrastructure — but the regulatory relationship is opposite: Reclamation owns and operates its dams directly, while FERC licenses and regulates privately and municipally owned hydroelectric projects, which means this Chicago-region Division of Dam Safety and Inspections engineer is an outside regulator rather than an asset owner. The core of the job is conducting inspections of licensed hydroelectric projects, including ones with difficult, complex, or controversial technical or public-interest features, then preparing engineering reports that formally establish and document each project's dam-safety status; a related duty is evaluating whether a project's design, constructability, and current condition still meet applicable engineering criteria and practices, which can mean flagging a decades-old structure for remediation under modern seismic or hydrologic standards. This posting is filled under Direct Hire Authority, consistent with FERC's difficulty recruiting engineers with hydroelectric and dam-safety specialization, a genuinely narrow field compared to general civil or structural engineering. The Chicago regional office of FERC's Office of Energy Projects covers a large share of the Midwest's licensed hydroelectric fleet — smaller run-of-river and storage projects on rivers across the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi basins — giving this role a wide geographic inspection territory relative to a single-facility engineering job. Relative to the Bureau of Reclamation supervisory role elsewhere in this batch, the clearest distinction is regulator versus operator: Reclamation engineers manage the safety of federal assets they operate, while FERC engineers independently verify the safety of privately licensed assets they don't own, which shapes the job around inspection, documentation, and enforcement rather than design or operations.