#19Ashraf Al Ameria

Before running a single Saudi contractor, Ashraf Al Ameria spent a large part of his career working on how the country delivers capital projects at a national level. Over two decades at Bechtel, he moved through a series of senior roles, including work on the Riyadh Metro's board, and eventually led a national project delivery organization tasked with reforming how Saudi Arabia planned and managed roughly $240 billion in capital projects, aligning practices closer to international standards. That kind of role gives someone a fairly unusual vantage point: rather than managing one company's backlog of projects, he was working on the systems and processes that shape how every large contractor in the country plans and delivers its work.

He joined El Seif Engineering Contracting in 2019, moving from that national-level policy role into Chief Operating Officer at a single, privately held construction company, a fairly significant change in scope even if the underlying subject matter, large-scale project delivery in Saudi Arabia, stayed the same. As COO, he was responsible for company-wide operations through a period that included the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the company's expansion into new sectors, a number of new international partnerships, and a major equity partnership with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. He was named Chief Executive Officer after several years in that role.

El Seif itself was founded in 1975 and has grown into one of the more established names in Saudi construction, with tens of thousands of employees and a project backlog that runs into the tens of billions of riyals. Its portfolio includes work across heavy civil and infrastructure, high-rise buildings, public works, and defence-related construction, along with a number of the more recognisable structures built in Saudi Arabia over the past two decades, from high-rise towers in Riyadh to transit infrastructure and government facilities.

Running a company with that scope means Al Ameria's job spans a wide range of project types and clients, from government ministries and defence-related agencies to entities tied to Saudi Arabia's giga-project program along the Red Sea coast and around Riyadh. That range mirrors, in a smaller and more concentrated way, the breadth of work he was exposed to earlier in his career overseeing project delivery reform at a national level, just applied now within the boundaries of a single company rather than an entire country's capital projects program.