Associate Tunnel Design Engineer at The Boring Company – Nashville, Tennessee

The Boring Company was founded to solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic by creating an underground network of tunnels. Today, we are building technology to increase tunneling speed and decrease costs by a factor of 10 or more, with the ultimate goal of making Hyperloop adoption viable and enabling rapid transit across densely populated regions.
This position supports the hard-rock tunnel project in Nashville limestone, excavated with a Main Beam TBM. The role splits time between field work and office-based design, working under senior geotechnical engineers alongside the construction team.
Responsibilities

• Field responsibilities include rock mass mapping (joints, bedding, karst features, RQD), inspection of rock bolt installations, pull testing, groundwater and probe hole observations, and support of instrumentation and monitoring programs (SMPs, AMTS, shape arrays).
• Office responsibilities include empirical tunneling analyses (Terzaghi, RMR, Q-system, Peck settlement methods), rock support and tunnel liner design, and 2D numerical modeling in PLAXIS to evaluate ground-structure interaction and excavation staging.
• This role also contributes to technical memoranda, design calculations, and agency submittals.

Key Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering, Geology, Engineering Geology, or related discipline.
• Internship or academic project experience related to geotechnical engineering, rock mechanics, or underground construction is a plus.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Undergraduate or graduate student in Civil Engineering with coursework or interest in geotechnical engineering or rock mechanics.
• Familiarity with PLAXIS or other FEM software, rock/soil lab testing, or underground construction is beneficial but not required.
• Exposure to design tools or software through coursework or internships.
• Strong analytical skills and willingness to learn in a fast-paced environment.

Additional Requirements

• Willingness to work extended hours or weekends as needed.
• This role is on-site in Nashville, TN (relocation support provided).
• Ability to work in tunnel environments periodically.

Growth path

• With experience, the role can expand into ownership of specific project components, such as the rock bolt testing program, geologic mapping and alignment profiles, PLAXIS models for individual tunnel segments, or sections of the liner design documentation

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