Head of Fire Safety

We offer a benefits package designed to help you thrive professionally and personally. This includes: private medical insurance for you and your family; life assurance; personal travel insurance; access to a range of wellbeing support, comprising virtual GP services, mental health support and lifestyle coaching; as well as discount programmes for various retailers. On our London campus, we have subsidised catering facilities, and host regular social events, and sports activities, for everyone to enjoy.

To support you in building a meaningful career, the practice offers opportunities to develop both your technical and non-technical skills through continuous learning, professional development support, and knowledge sharing and insights from experienced colleagues.

If our designs spark your curiosity and you would like to contribute to solving complex challenges with local and global impact, we invite you to join our team. You’ll be challenged and inspired, collaborating on extraordinary projects in an environment designed to cultivate excellence.

As a Head of Fire Safety at Foster + Partners, you will lead the Fire Safety Team in driving a proactive, holistic and risk-based approach to fire engineering across the organisation. You'll shape fire safety strategy on diverse international projects, support studio teams, contribute expert guidance throughout the design lifecycle and play a key role in elevating technical excellence and knowledge within the practice.

• Lead a specialist team and champion fire‑safe design across global project portfolios.
• Develop innovative, evidence-based fire safety solutions that support architectural ambition.
• Identify fire related risks and opportunities across all project stages.
• Guide teams on the wider impact of fire safety on construction, installation and maintenance.
• Review fire engineering strategies, reports and studies from internal and external experts.

• Chartered status and extensive experience (around 15 years) in fire engineering or a related field.
• Strong understanding of qualitative and quantitative risk assessment and fire focused analysis.
• Confidence managing competing demands while maintaining high standards of accuracy and judgement.
• Experience working with international regulatory and fire safety frameworks.
• Ability to use tools such as MicroStation, InDesign, FDS, CFAST, B‑RISK, OZone, MACS+ or structural analysis software.
• Strong design understanding and confidence reviewing design decisions and documentation.
• Desirable: experience with advanced engineering methods (e.g., CFD, FEA, reliability analysis) or programming (e.g., MATLAB, Python, R).