Electrical Commissioning Engineer (Off-site Support) Cape Town
Kirby Group Engineering Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Construction · 1,001-5,000 employees
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About the role
The Electrical Commissioning Engineer provides technical, planning, and documentation support from the Cape Town office to project teams across Ireland, the UK, and Europe. Responsibilities include coordinating electrical testing, developing commissioning strategies, and ensuring project deliverables meet quality and safety standards.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must hold a recognized qualification in Electrical Engineering or a related discipline with at least 3 years of relevant experience. Strong technical writing skills, proficiency in Microsoft Office, and the ability to interpret complex electrical drawings and specifications are required.
Benefits
Full description
- Permanent position available with a considerable portfolio of works for the next 5+ years
- To build your career by assisting in the delivery of ‘leading edge’ engineering projects.
- To work with a vibrant, agile and multi-functional team in delivering projects on time, safely, to budget and to the required quality standards.
- To benefit from Kirby’s Career Development Programmes that will enhance your leadership capability.
- To work with the best.
- Excellent package on offer with room for negotiations
About Kirby Group Engineering Kirby Group Engineering is an international multi-disciplinary engineering services contractor and leading provider of high-value engineering services to a number of ‘blue chip’ companies. Operating across Ireland, the UK, Europe and South Africa, Kirby has become the engineering service provider of choice in growth segments such as pharmaceuticals, data centres and power transmission and distribution. Our culture is innovative, collaborative and performance focused. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to grow and develop in a company committed to developing talent and rewarding performance.
Role Purpose The Electrical Commissioning Engineer provides technical, planning, and documentation support from the Cape Town office to project teams across Ireland, the UK and Europe. The role supports a consistent commissioning process from design through handover by defining scope, preparing and controlling deliverables, maintaining accurate project data, and providing timely remote technical assistance.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Support the Commissioning Lead in planning, coordinating, tracking, and reporting electrical testing, turnover, and commissioning activities across assigned projects.
- Review scopes, specifications, drawings, schedules, submittals, and contract requirements. Prepare project familiarisation outputs including deliverables, acceptance criteria, owners, and key dates; to prove system commissionability.
- Develop and maintain electrical asset and system lists, tags, boundaries, interfaces, dependency matrices, and drawing pull packs against the latest approved design information.
- Prepare and control commissioning strategies, implementation plans, check sheets, test scripts, method statements, and IST documents. Maintain Levels 0-5 schedules,lookaheads, and trackers aligned with the programme, and system dependencies.
- Review SLDs, schematics, layouts, cable and panel schedules, protection studies and settings, control philosophies, and cause-and-effect documents; to cover utility supplies, MV/LV switchgear, transformers, generators, UPS and batteries, busway, distribution, cabling, earthing, lightning protection, lighting, metering, and associated controls.
- Prepare and review project test sheets and packs, including panel charts, pre- and post energisation checks, point-to-point tests, busbar inspections, earthing and bonding, torque records, protection values, marked-up drawings, photographs, approvals, and retest evidence. Confirm completeness, traceability, and technical consistency.
- Review vendor FAT/SAT procedures, certificates, test packs, and submissions. Confirm valid calibration, prerequisites, instruments, acceptance criteria, and sign-off evidence.
- Develop or review temporary-power, load-bank, and Levels 4-5 power-cascade plans. Support energisation, switching, outage, isolation, and LOTO documentation.
- Administer commissioning and common data platforms, including asset records, document and script uploads, system transfers, revision control, and company records. Support L1-L3 readiness and tagging for CFCI/OFCI assets, programme activity
identifiers, walkdown status, drawing packs, checklists, invitations, and lookaheads using verified site information.
- Maintain trackers, dashboards, action registers, snag lists, and non-conformance logs. Follow up actions, verify close-out evidence, and prepare accurate daily/weekly reports, spreadsheets, Power BI updates, and presentations.
- Provide structured remote technical support, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis. Coordinate interfaces with mechanical plant, BMS, EPMS, fire alarm, life-safety, and controls, and escalate significant safety, quality, programme, or technical risks.
- Support handover by checking turnover packs, certificates, as-built records, O&M manuals, training records, signoffs, and actions. Participate in coordination meetings and required visits, FATs, SATs, witness tests, or IST; improve templates, lessons learned, procedures, and digital workflows; and comply with company policies on data security.
Requirements
- Recognised qualification in Electrical Engineering, Electrical Power Engineering, Building Services Engineering, or a related discipline, with typically 3+ years of relevant engineering, commissioning, or mission-critical project experience.
- Practical knowledge of electrical distribution and commissioning documentation, with the ability to interpret drawings, specifications, schedules, vendor data, and test results and convert them into clear actions and deliverables.
- Strong technical writing, record-keeping, document-control, revision, and traceability skills. Proficiency in Microsoft Office is required; experience with drawing tools, commissioning platforms, reporting tools, and snagging systems is advantageous.
- Clear written and spoken English; able to work with geographically diverse teams. Must be eligible to work in South Africa, willing to work from the Cape Town office, and available for project travel when required.
For more information on this role, or other Construction / Engineering opportunities across Ireland, the UK, Europe, or South Africa please review our careers page (Vacancies - Kirby Group Careers) or contact the Talent Acquisition Team at Kirby Group in confidence on +353 (0)1 454 0411.
Kirby Group Engineering is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace and welcome applications from all suitably qualified candidates, regardless of race, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or age.