IN Brief:
- COWI is adding a Surrey, British Columbia office alongside its existing North Vancouver operation.
- The location will support multidisciplinary bridge, tunnel, transport, marine, geotechnical, and heavy civil engineering.
- Current Surrey recruitment and COWI’s British Columbia transport work indicate continued investment in regional engineering capacity.
COWI is set to open a new office in Surrey, British Columbia, expanding its engineering presence across Greater Vancouver as the consultancy develops its Canadian transport and civil-infrastructure workload.
The office at 9850 King George Boulevard will complement COWI’s existing base in North Vancouver and provide a second location within the Greater Vancouver area. The consultancy says the operation will support the same multidisciplinary services already delivered from North Vancouver, spanning bridges, tunnels, transportation, marine and coastal engineering, geotechnics, and heavy civil work.
Roads and highways are also identified as a growth area as project activity increases across Western Canada. COWI’s current recruitment already lists Surrey as a location for senior roads and highways, ports and marine structures, and geotechnical positions, giving the planned office a defined engineering role rather than treating it solely as a business-development address.
Anne-Marie Langlois, Vice President and Head of Engineering, Canada at COWI, said Surrey offered “rapid growth, strong transit connectivity, and direct connection to downtown Vancouver”. The office sits beside rapid transit in Surrey City Centre, widening the area from which the consultancy can recruit engineers, technical specialists, and project professionals.
That labour-market consideration is substantial in a region experiencing sustained population growth. City of Surrey figures put the municipality’s projected population at 733,760 in 2026, rising to 805,398 by 2031, increasing pressure on transport, utilities, public infrastructure, and development delivery across the Lower Mainland.
The City Centre itself is developing around higher-density, transit-oriented growth, with King George Boulevard and surrounding rapid-transit corridors acting as focal points for employment, residential, retail, and civic development. Locating technical staff there gives COWI access to a different commuting catchment from its North Vancouver operation while retaining connections across the metropolitan area.
The consultancy already has substantial British Columbia infrastructure work. Its North American project portfolio includes design solutions for the Fraser River Tunnel project, which will replace the George Massey Tunnel with an eight-lane immersed-tube crossing incorporating general traffic, bus rapid transit, and provision for cyclists and pedestrians.
COWI is part of the engineering effort around a project that combines tunnel design with seismic, geotechnical, marine, transport, and construction challenges. That combination closely matches the disciplines the Surrey office is intended to support, particularly where bridge, tunnel, marine, and ground-engineering expertise need to work as one project team.
Large transport schemes rarely align neatly with office boundaries. Specialist designers may be distributed between cities and countries, while local project staff still need proximity to customers, sites, regulators, and the wider construction market. A second Greater Vancouver base therefore adds capacity without requiring COWI to duplicate every discipline in a single location.
The company’s wider Canadian network currently includes offices in North Vancouver, Edmonton, Halifax, and Toronto. Its North American work covers transportation, water, marine, tunnels, bridges, and federal infrastructure, drawing on specialist businesses acquired over several decades.
Surrey adds a southern Greater Vancouver location to that network as investment continues across British Columbia’s transport corridors. The geographic distinction is practical: movement between the North Shore and communities south of the Fraser can be significant, particularly during peak periods, so locating teams on both sides can widen recruitment and reduce dependence on one commuting pattern.
The expansion also reflects a shift in engineering consultancies towards locating specialist capacity closer to long-term infrastructure programmes rather than relying entirely on project offices assembled for individual contracts. Permanent regional offices carry recruitment and management overhead, so their usefulness depends on a sufficient pipeline of work to support staff beyond one construction phase.
COWI has not disclosed a staffing target or opening date beyond announcing that the Surrey location is being established. Its current vacancies nevertheless show the location already being used in recruitment for technical and management roles, including highways, marine structures, and geotechnical design.
That provides a more tangible measure of the expansion than the office address alone. A consultancy gains little engineering capacity from another name on its property list; capacity comes from the people able to design, review, coordinate, and deliver projects from it.
With Greater Vancouver continuing to add population and major transport schemes requiring increasingly multidisciplinary teams, the Surrey office gives COWI another base from which to compete for that work. The next measure of the expansion will be recruitment — and the extent to which those new engineering posts translate into delivery capacity on British Columbia’s infrastructure programme.
