Civil Engineer at Forest Service — Andalusia, AL

Like the Colorado posting in this same Forest Service National Hiring effort, this civil engineer role's exact assignment — tentatively near Andalusia, Alabama — is confirmed only when a job offer is extended, since the announcement covers multiple vacancies across different duty locations nationally. The specific duties here lean toward early-stage project development rather than construction oversight: investigating and locating candidate road and trail routes with aerial photography and topographic mapping, drafting sizing and layout criteria for lower-complexity facility, utility, and structure projects, and conducting preliminary site surveys to gather soils, topography, drainage, and existing-utility data that later design work depends on. That combination — route investigation, design criteria development, and field survey work — sits earlier in a project's lifecycle than the construction-inspection-heavy Forest Service roles found elsewhere in this hiring effort, making it a more design-and-planning-oriented entry point into Forest Service civil engineering. A Professional Engineer license becomes increasingly relevant as an engineer in this role advances from field data collection into independent design work with stamping authority — reached via the same accredited-degree, exam, and supervised-experience pipeline used across the agency's broader engineering career ladder, rather than any credential unique to this posting. Southern Alabama's national forest land, mixed pine forest with a dense network of unpaved and lightly paved forest roads, creates steady demand for road and trail design and survey work distinct from the state's more commercial and industrial civil engineering market centered around Mobile and Birmingham, where private land development and municipal infrastructure dominate instead of forest transportation and recreation infrastructure.