Supervisory Interdisciplinary Civil/Agricultural Engineer (State Conservation Engineer) at Natural Resources Conservation Service — Portland, OR

NRCS engineering doesn't look like municipal or highway civil engineering, and this posting makes that explicit by requiring a current state PE license up front rather than treating it as a later-career milestone. The agency's civil and agricultural engineers design and set standards for conservation practices — earthen dams and small impoundments, irrigation and drainage systems, streambank and wetland restoration structures, animal-waste containment — built on private agricultural land through cost-share programs, which means the engineering has to satisfy both structural safety codes and NRCS's own national technical standards. A State Conservation Engineer sits above individual project design: the job is setting engineering standards and specifications statewide, reviewing and approving the designs field engineers and conservation technicians produce, and managing the staff, training, and budget behind that program, which is why this posting is graded and titled as a supervisory role rather than a design position. Oregon's agricultural engineering market is shaped by the state's water-scarce eastern basins and its higher-value western valley farmland, both of which generate steady conservation-engineering demand independent of the state's civil-engineering-heavy Portland metro construction market; NRCS state offices, Bureau of Reclamation regional offices, and irrigation-district engineering staffs are the main employers competing for the same small pool of PE-licensed agricultural engineers. What separates this role from a general water-resources or environmental engineer is the private-land, cost-share delivery model: NRCS engineers work through voluntary conservation programs and landowner agreements rather than public infrastructure contracts, and the PE requirement here functions as a floor for technical credibility when a state engineer is signing off on designs and standards that field staff across an entire state will apply.