Second Kiwi engineer reaches for stars

The Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia will be the world's first kilometre-high building.

A second Kiwi engineer is working on the world's tallest new tower and the first kilometre-high building.

Hamilton-born Damien Fletcher is working with Greg Sang, the Aucklander who last month said he had moved from a key role on the world's current tallest building, Dubai's Burj Khalifa, to Hong Kong and now to Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Tower in Jeddah.

Fletcher, 37, a civil engineer educated at Unitec, said he had initially worked for Mainzeal, Downer, Fulton Hogan and Dominion in New Zealand.

"My most noteworthy projects back home would include Britomart Station, the Lumley Centre, and Precinct apartments [in Lorne St], all being reasonably iconic projects at the time," Fletcher said.

"But over the course of 11 years in Auckland, I also completed a few low-rise civil projects as well."

In 2007, he left to travel.

Artist impression of the Kingdom Tower.

"But I ended up initially working for a developer on a big basement build over the London Underground before moving on to the London 2012 Olympics as a project manager on the broadcasting centre. I finished that project late in 2010 and went to Cambodia to run a D+B island resort development, Song Saa, for a main contractor and then returned to London early 2012," Fletcher said.

There, he worked on the London tower in Vauxhall which a helicopter smashed into in January 2013.

Artist impression of the Kingdom Tower currently under construction.

"I then went on to run a large top-down basement in the middle of London for a development that will be known as One Blackfriars," Fletcher said. "I'm particularly proud of this one as the raft pour sits in the list for the top three biggest concrete pours in London of all time," he said.

"Having recently completed the big basement in April, my next adventure has found me here building the tallest building in the world and very much looking forward to getting on with it and getting it up there."