How To Become A Principal Project Engineer: What It Is and Career Path

What is a principal project engineer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

Quoted experts

Bijan Shapoorian,

Brian Denton Ph.D.

A principal project engineer is an engineering officer that ensures that all engineering projects are properly carried out. You work closely with other strategic and tactical leaders of the company. The principal project engineer designs workflow, guidelines, and objectives. You ensure that the engineering and technical support is available when needed. Since you are the project lead, your job is to execute the capital project and provide expert service. You are to implement a safety process and ensure that this process is complied with throughout the company. As the principal project engineer, you will manage vendors and ensure that they comply with the specification. Also, you will be the communication coordinator between the software designers and the product evaluation engineer.

The principal project manager must possess excellent delegation, interpersonal, communication, team building, and customer service skills. Your earning for this job is about $124,000 annually. The minimum educational qualification is a master's degree in project engineer or other related courses.

What general advice would you give to a principal project engineer?

Bijan Shapoorian

Adjunct Professor, The University of Texas at Arlington

In most Construction Management programs, Internship courses prepares the students for the job market and the industry. Those CM students who have obtained a degree in CM but lack work experience are recommended to search for internship opportunities if finding employment becomes a challenge. Students are advised to be flexible and willing to relocate to geographical areas with higher demand for this profession.

ScorePrincipal Project EngineerUS Average

Salary

8.2

Avg. Salary $122,090

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

7.5

Growth rate 10%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

6.7

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.17%

Asian 15.52%

Black or African American 4.30%

Hispanic or Latino 10.54%

Unknown 3.89%

White 65.58%

Gender

female 11.29%

male 88.71%

Age - 41

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 41

Stress level

7.5

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

8.3

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

5.1

Work life balance is fair

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a principal project engineer

Explore principal project engineer education requirements

Most common principal project engineer degrees

Bachelor's

69.4 %

Master's

18.9 %

Associate

5.8 %

Start to develop specific principal project engineer skills

Skills	Percentages
Project Management	23.80%
Program Management	13.07%
DOD	7.20%
Risk Management	6.47%
Project Scope	3.05%

Complete relevant principal project engineer training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 6-12 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New principal project engineers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a principal project engineer based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real principal project engineer resumes.

Research principal project engineer duties and responsibilities

Lead a team of contracts management, engineering and marketing to secure multi-million dollar contracts from DoD and commercial customers.
Manage multiple crews for installation, implementation and service of RF and telecommunications systems throughout Florida.
Construct thread-safe, share memory libraries for concurrent data capture in Java and C++.
Used a variety of debugging tools to trace and debug multithreading applications on both development and production stage.

Get principal project engineer experience

Generally, it takes 2-4 years to become a principal project engineer. The most common roles before becoming a principal project engineer include project engineer, project manager team lead and senior engineer.

Prepare your principal project engineer resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your principal project engineer resume.

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