Established in 2020 in the North Shore of Vancouver, B.C., Arch Engineers offers a range of engineering, infrastructure, energy and renewables, mining and forestry, and project delivery services. Its foundation services span full life cycle delivery – from geostructural analysis and shoring design through to bridge launches and heavy-lift planning.
The company has grown to approximately 30 full-time professionals – 15 who are based in its North Vancouver headquarters, and the rest in satellite hubs in Calgary, the U.S., India and South Africa.
“That footprint lets us leverage time zones for optimum project velocity, and put designers close to major clients while still drawing on a single integrated design platform,” said Arch Engineers CEO Devlin Fenton. “Our mission is simple: deliver non-negotiable quality faster than anyone else. Clients tell us they feel the difference in our 24-hour RFI turnaround and our habit of showing up on-site at a moment’s notice.”
Since forming five years ago, the company has operated on four values:
- Responsiveness: Schedules drive design, not the other way around.
- Sustainability: Every permanent design carries a carbon budget.
- Ingenuity: They prototype in digital twins first, so problems surface early.
- Respect: Especially toward Indigenous rights-holders whose lands they work on.
“This mix of speed, environmental rigour and cultural respect is rare in heavy-civil engineering,” said Fenton. “It’s our competitive edge.”
Current projects
The company is most active in Western Canada and the North – B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon and Northwest Territories. They also routinely support U.S. projects out of their Las Vegas hub. Two impressive projects the company is currently involved with include:
SkyTrain – surface temporary works & elevated guideway foundations (Vancouver, B.C.)
Arch Engineers was part of the construction-engineering provider for various subsurface structures on some of the most challenging locations – with live traffic lanes, dense utilities and existing structures.
- Geotechnical and geostructural integration: The team analyzed the glacio-marine till underlying the corridor, verified pile capacity against downdrag from adjacent excavations, and produced a 3D soil-structure interaction model to confirm settlement tolerances.
- Complex rebar-cage trip studies: Cast-in-place piles reached 28 metres. They modelled centre-of-gravity shifts during cage rotation, then designed bespoke strong-back frames and bail-bar spacings so a single 300-tonne crawler crane could “flip and stab” cages safely in a limited headroom envelope.
- Rigging and lift engineering: The company’s lift plans covered dozens of picks – formwork panels, screed beams and pre-fabricated column shells – each checked against wind-on-load and crane capacity charts.
- Formwork design for cast-in-place: The team detailed steel-frame gang forms with bolt-on kicker brackets, accommodating variable column haunch geometry without re-fabrication, cutting formwork change-out time significantly.
Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink (Western Canada)
Over 26 months, the team has engineered more than 250 horizontal directional drilling, tunnel boring machine, auger-bore and pipe-roof crossings along two of Canada’s headline pipeline corridors.
- Ground-agnostic design: From peat-bog marshes in the Fraser River Delta to Class A granite near Valemount, B.C., the company’s bore-pit shoring systems range from sheet-pile and hydraulic struts to soldier-pile/lagging hybrids with real-time inclinometer monitoring.
- Extreme-climate constructability: At −40 degrees Celsius in northern B.C., the team specified heated compound struts and low-temperature steel grades. In the spring-thaw muskeg, mats were floated over mud using an innovative leapfrogging bridge on sheet pile system and the team designed articulated access ramps to support shorter crossings.
- Pragmatic, contractor-friendly solutions: Many drawing packages include a “Field Change Matrix” that lets superintendents swap out walers or struts (pre-checked permutations) without waiting for an RFI, thereby cutting downtime by days.
- Environmental stewardship: In salmon-bearing creeks, the company paired sheet-piled cofferdams with passive groundwater cut-offs and turbidity curtains, winning DFO sign-off on first submission.
Core values
Fenton says the company is especially proud of how it turns core values into competitive advantages. “At Arch Engineers, innovation isn’t an R&D side project – it’s the natural outcome of living our core values every day. We innovate because we must design faster, build smarter and tread lighter than our competitors. These three intertwined practices make that happen.”
Agile design for warp-speed delivery
The company’s brand promise – non-negotiable quality, market-leading speed – drives a radically agile engineering process. The team breaks a project into short, discipline-integrated sprints: geotechnical modelling one day, structural checks the next and constructability review the day after. Every sprint ends with a formal design-check gate aligned with the Canadian Standards Association and Engineers and Geoscientists BC (or other regulatory body) requirements, so approvals keep pace with the work instead of bottlenecking it.
“The result is 24-hour [request for information] turnarounds and week-scale drawing packages that most firms need a month to produce – all without compromising peer review or regulatory compliance,” explained Fenton.
Sustainability through reuse and inventory engineering
Speed alone is meaningless if it burns resources, so every Arch Engineers’ proposal includes a reuse and repurpose option set. The team combs the client’s “boneyard” and vendor inventories for surplus sheet piles, wide-flange beams or pre-engineered gang forms that can slot into their temporary-works scheme.
On the SkyTrain, the company reinspected existing formwork frames, saving 18 tonnes of new steel. On the Coastal GasLink bore pits, contractor-owned sheet piles were converted into soldier-pile/lagging hybrids, cutting embodied carbon significantly. “Designing for second-life use keeps material out of landfills and money in a client’s pocket, turning sustainability into a tangible schedule and cost advantage,” said Fenton.
AI augmented engineering intelligence
To eliminate “design-from-scratch” syndrome, selected project teams work alongside domain-specific AI agents trained on thousands of past Arch drawings, calculation sets and site reports. The agent can surface a proven waler layout for a 12-metre pit in glacial till or flag clash risks between rebar cages and vibratory hammer leads – all in seconds.
“Engineers remain accountable for the final design, but the AI slashes first-principles drafting time, standardizes [quality control] checklists and preserves institutional knowledge that would otherwise walk out the door with retiring staff,” said Fenton
What’s next?
“In the next five years we’re scaling east. Calgary will become a full-service office by 2026, and we’re negotiating a joint venture in Ontario to plant a flag in the GTA. Technically we’ll productize our digital-twin platform so owners can log in and track as-built versus model in real time. Internally we’re targeting carbon-neutral operations by 2028. Already our field trucks run a strict no-idling policy,” said Fenton
In 10 years, the company sees itself as a national heavy-civil brand that is synonymous with rapid, sustainable design. Every project will run through an AI-assisted design loop and at least one-third of its revenue will flow through Indigenous alliances.
“We’re also seeding an R&D fund for ultra-high-performance concretes and steel-timber hybrids as they are pivotal for net-zero 2050 goals,” added Fenton. “And finally, we’re building an employee-ownership model, so the next generation of engineers inherit both equity and responsibility.”