Engineering that cannot be built is just drawing. Alan Harris learned the difference working summers as a residential laborer in Clinton, Mississippi, well before he learned it in a classroom, and it has shaped every project since. As Executive Director of Structural and Civil Engineering, he serves as RNGD's senior technical authority for structural and civil work across every sector and every delivery method — and is charged with building the in-house engineering function from the ground up.
“Engineering that can't be built is just drawing.”
That mandate is as much organizational as technical. Alan is recruiting and developing the team, defining how engineering integrates with sales, design, manufacturing, and field execution, and establishing the standards, kit-of-parts strategies, and repeatable engineering solutions that the Renegade Delivery Method requires to work at scale. In parallel, he is providing hands-on technical leadership across active projects and pursuits while the broader function takes shape.
He arrives with more than 16 years of civil and structural engineering experience on commercial, industrial, marine, municipal, and institutional projects across the country. A licensed Professional Engineer in 19 states and recognized by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying as a Model Law Engineer, Alan has worked the Gulf Coast, both coasts, and the interior United States for developers, industrial owners, architects, contractors, municipalities, and public agencies. His technical range is unusually wide — marine and waterfront infrastructure, industrial facilities, forensic engineering, delegated design, value engineering, historic preservation and adaptive reuse, foundation systems, stormwater infrastructure, and construction engineering — spanning marine terminals, ports, wharves and bulkheads, healthcare facilities, schools, and complex historic restorations. He also serves as an expert witness in structural failures, construction defects, and storm damage disputes.
Alan earned a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of New Orleans in 2010 while competing as a four-year NCAA Division I baseball student-athlete. He began working full-time as an engineering intern during his final semester and stayed with that firm for fourteen years, advancing to Senior Civil Engineer leading multidisciplinary teams, and spending his last four years concurrently as Senior Project Manager at a sister construction firm with oversight of roughly $15 million in construction. After earning his P.E. in 2015, he founded and ran his own civil, structural, forensic, and marine engineering consultancy alongside that work — an entrepreneurial track that gave him the owner's side of the table to go with the engineer's.
He remains closely involved with the University of New Orleans, serving on multiple fundraising initiatives and chairing the UNO Athletics Golf Committee. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Concrete Institute, an affiliate member of the American Institute of Architects, and a member of several local chambers of commerce. Outside of engineering, Alan is a CrossFit Level 2 Trainer who coaches functional fitness, and spends his time on golf, hunting, fishing, and the outdoors.