I spent 20 years in engineering learning what nobody teaches you.

Now I help senior women engineers use that knowledge to build careers that actually fit their lives — not just the next role that happens to be available.

I’m Órlagh Costello — engineer, coach, speaker, and the person behind EngineerHer. After more than 20 years working across multiple engineering industries, I now work with senior women engineers who are technically excellent, quietly exhausted, and ready for something to actually change. I know this territory because I’ve lived it. Here’s how it started.

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It was about 5am on a Tuesday morning, in the middle of a factory shutdown. Someone had made a mistake. An entire production line had gone down unexpectedly, senior managers were calling, and my engineers were working the problem. I was managing upwards, fielding questions, keeping the space clear so the people who could actually fix it could get on and fix it.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I had a very clear thought: I have lived through this exact morning before. More than once. And I don’t want to live through it again.

Not the crisis itself — I could handle that. It was the realisation that the work I was being asked to do had drifted so far from what had drawn me into engineering in the first place. The reviews, the charts, the presentations trying to make bad data look acceptable. The endless meetings that filled the space where the actual problem-solving used to be. I had become very good at managing the machine. And managing the machine was not why I became an engineer.

I also realised something else that morning — something that took longer to name. I had been making my life fit my job for years. And I needed it to work the other way around. My values, my ethics, my family, the kind of work I could be genuinely proud of — those had to come first. The job had to fit around them. And the job I was in, at that point in my career, simply didn’t.

So I decided to change.

What I found, on the other side of that decision, was that I wasn’t unusual. Over more than 20 years working across multiple engineering industries, I had watched countless talented, passionate women make the same quiet drift. What starts us in engineering is almost always a deep call to solve problems. Very few women come into this profession without that. But the problems we’re asked to solve change over time — and when they drift too far from what lit us up in the first place, something dims.

Enthusiastic, capable engineers become something else. Not because they stopped caring. Because they stopped being given anything worth caring about — or because the shape of their life changed and the job never adapted with it. That’s what EngineerHer is built to address. Not the women. The situation.

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I work primarily with senior women engineers — women with 10, 15, 20 years of experience who are technically excellent and quietly stuck. Women who:

If that’s you, you’re not broken and you’re not alone. You’re carrying what I call the Leadership Load — the invisible weight that builds up over years of delivering in environments that take more than they give back. It’s real, it’s common, and there’s a way through it.

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I’m an engineer. That matters. I’m not a career coach who has read about engineering — I’ve lived it, across multiple industries and more than two decades. I know what it feels like to be the only woman in the room. I know the particular exhaustion of being excellent and overlooked at the same time. And I know that the path out of it is specific to each person, not generic.

I’m also a coach, a speaker, and a consultant — which means I work at the individual level (helping you figure out your next move) and at the organisational level (helping engineering teams understand why they keep losing their best women, and what to do about it).

20+ years in engineering Across multiple industries and disciplines — I’ve seen the pattern from the inside.	Coach & consultant Working with individuals and organisations to make things structurally better.
Speaker Speaking at events on women in engineering, leadership, and building sustainable careers in male-dominated industries.	Ireland-based, global reach Working with women engineers across industries and time zones — the pattern is remarkably consistent.

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Every week I write about the specific, structural things that make engineering careers harder for women than they need to be — and what to actually do about them. Not motivation. Not mindset tips. Practical, honest thinking for women who are already excellent at their jobs and need a strategy, not a pep talk.

Recent posts have covered the Leadership Load framework, why being indispensable is a trap rather than a strategy, why what most people call imposter syndrome is actually a structural problem, and how to build technical credibility without burning out.

Read the blog →

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