Delmay Lavigilante on leading Hatch’s team through the Runway 16-34 Overlay Project at Melbourne Airport, and why she believes engineering is for anyone curious enough to try it.
Overview
- Delmay Lavigilante is a civil engineer at Hatch who worked on Melbourne Airport’s Runway 16-34 Overlay Project, from early design through construction and into the defect liability period.
- The project won Melbourne Airport’s 2023 ESG excellence award and is still used as a benchmark for delivery standards at the airport.
- Delmay grew up in a family with no ties to engineering, and says her mother’s belief that she could be anything shaped the career she has built.
- She wants more women to consider engineering, and believes the biggest barrier isn’t ability, it’s that most people have no idea what the job actually involves.
Delmay Lavigilante has always wanted to know how things work. Maths, physics and chemistry were her favourite subjects at school, and as a teenager she watched Megastructures on National Geographic, amazed that a group of people could design and build something meant to last a lifetime from scratch.
She grew up in a family with no connection to engineering at all. What she had instead was a mother who believed she could be anything she wanted to be, and gave her the means to become the woman, and the civil engineer, she is today.
Why civil engineering, specifically
Delmay knew early on that she wanted a career built on applied science, one that let her solve problems using the fundamentals of physics while making a real difference to people’s lives. Engineering, she found, was the field that ticked every box.
Within engineering, civil stood out for its breadth. It is a discipline that spans road, rail, aviation and everything in between, dropping you into a different environment with a different set of problems each time. Delmay says:
“I wanted variety and exposure on major infrastructure projects. That’s why I picked civil engineering at university.”
That variety has held. In the past few years, Delmay has worked across rail, road and aviation projects, first as a civil engineer on the tools, and more recently as a project manager.
The project that changed everything
Delmay’s most significant project to date is the Runway 16-34 Overlay Project at Melbourne Airport. She joined in October 2021 during the schematic design phase, and stayed on through detailed design, procurement, construction and into the defect liability period that continues today.
As Assistant Project Manager, she helped lead a team through a construction phase that demanded a heavy schedule of night shifts. The focus from day one was getting the best people from each team into the room, and keeping them there through teamwork, open communication and proactiveness.
It worked. The project won Melbourne Airport’s Environmental, Social and Governance Excellence Award in 2023, and remains a reference point for delivery standards at the airport today.
Curious about what it’s like to work at Hatch?
For Delmay, the project was as much a personal turning point as a professional one.
“I gained invaluable experience, and grew not just on a professional standpoint but also on a personal front.”
A workplace built for engineers who think like entrepreneurs
Hatch describes itself as “entrepreneurs with a technical soul”, employee-owned and independent, working across 150 countries in the metals, energy and infrastructure sectors. Rather than follow a fixed playbook, that independence gives its 11,000 professionals room to bring their best thinking to a client’s business.
For Delmay, that shows up in the range of problems she gets to solve.
“The diversity of problems you get to solve, and the multidisciplinary nature of each engagement, requires us to get out of our silos. Every project pulls on a different set of skills and a different group of specialists, and that variety is what keeps the work interesting, project after project.
Why visibility matters
Delmay’s advice to women weighing up a career in engineering is direct: go for it.
“We have so many facilities as women compared to our predecessors. Whilst there is still work to be done as a society for women to be on par with our male counterparts in all aspects of life, I personally think the engineering field is accessible to all, and a very rewarding career choice.”
She sees the biggest opportunity in changing how the field is talked about. Most people have no real idea what a civil engineer does day to day.
“I think we could start by being vocal about what we do. The key is to try to put things into perspective and distill it into layman’s terms, and explain why we were drawn to this profession and why we do the things we do.”
Delmay’s career, from a teenager captivated by Megastructures to assistant project manager on an award-winning runway project, is a reminder that engineering rewards curiosity more than connections. It is a field built for people who want to solve real problems and see the results in the world around them.
