EHS Director

Aecon Group

What is the Opportunity?

Aecon is seeking an experienced EHS Director to lead Health, Safety, and Environmental performance on major transit and infrastructure projects delivered through collaborative contracting models such as Alliance and Progressive Design-Build. Reporting to the Project Director, this role is responsible for integrating EHS into every phase of project delivery - ensuring risks are proactively identified and managed, regulatory compliance is maintained, and a strong, transparent safety culture is embedded across design, construction, and commissioning.

The successful candidate will be a visible leader and trusted partner to project, client, and JV teams, driving best-in-class safety outcomes and enabling efficient, incident-free delivery in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.

This opportunity is part of Aecon UTS’ proactive talent pipelining as the business continues to expand across major transit projects. We are engaging passive, high-calibre leaders in the market to build relationships ahead of upcoming project awards.

What You’ll Do Here:

• Lead the Environment, Health, and Safety function for collaborative contracting models such as Alliance, Progressive Design-Build, CMGC, and other integrated delivery environments, ensuring EHS is embedded into project planning, design development, construction execution, commissioning, and handover.
• Provide project-level strategic leadership for EHS performance, ensuring the project operates with a clear, disciplined, and proactive approach to worker safety, environmental protection, regulatory compliance, and operational readiness.
• Establish, implement, and continuously improve the project’s EHS management framework in alignment with Aecon requirements, client obligations, regulatory standards, contractual commitments, and project-specific risks.
• Ensure EHS requirements are integrated into the project delivery model from the outset, including design reviews, work packaging, construction planning, temporary works, access strategies, commissioning activities, and operational interface planning.
• Partner closely with the Project Director, construction leadership, technical teams, project controls, commercial, and JV partners to ensure EHS is treated as a core project delivery function, not a standalone compliance activity.
• Work with Operations Leadership to confirm the right EHS organizational structure, field coverage, and specialist capability are in place to support the project’s scope, complexity, work fronts, schedule, and risk profile.
• Lead the development, implementation, and oversight of project-specific EHS plans, procedures, standards, training programs, safe work practices, emergency response plans, environmental management plans, and assurance processes.
• Ensure EHS considerations are embedded into collaborative planning and decision-making, including constructability reviews, phased design progression, possession planning, access coordination, logistics strategies, subcontractor onboarding, and readiness reviews.
• Provide leadership in hazard identification, risk assessment, critical risk management, and mitigation planning across all phases of the project, including design, procurement, construction, testing, commissioning, and handover.
• Drive a strong focus on serious injury and fatality prevention, high-risk activity controls, verification of critical controls, and field leadership routines that reinforce safe execution in complex, high-consequence environments.
• Oversee incident prevention, investigation, corrective action management, and lessons learned processes, ensuring issues are addressed thoroughly, actions are closed effectively, and learning is translated into project-wide improvement.
• Lead end-to-end investigations for significant incidents, high-potential events, and environmental occurrences, and communicate findings, root causes, and corrective strategies in a clear, executive-ready manner.
• Establish and monitor project EHS KPIs, dashboards, leading indicators, lagging indicators, trend analysis, and performance reviews to prov