Shimmick

Shimmick has spent most of its 35 years underground and underwater: dams, tunnels, treatment plants, pump stations. Founded in 1990 and now headquartered in Irvine, California, the firm trades on Nasdaq as SHIM and says it ranks inside ENR’s top 10 for water supply, dams and treatment facilities. About 970 people work there. Shimmick is design-builder on San Diego’s North City Pure Water Facility, the first major piece of a potable reuse program the city expects to cover a large share of its supply. The company has pushed into data center and energy work too. Recent quarters have carried losses from legacy projects it inherited before going public, and it’s still working those off.

Shimmick’s corporate history reads as a chain of acquisitions, and the lineage matters because it explains the depth. Legacy company Washington Construction acquired Morrison Knudsen; Washington Construction later acquired Raytheon Engineers and Constructors to become Washington Group International; AECOM acquired URS for $5.3 billion and separately acquired Shimmick, merging it into the civil construction and mining group and doubling that division’s size. Rust Constructors, another legacy company, has worked at the Black Thunder Mine since 1993. The firm eventually completed an IPO on the Nasdaq Global Market.

The record that came out of that is heavy civil at the difficult end. Shimmick opened the Gerald Desmond Bridge, the first cable-stayed vehicular bridge in California. It won the San Vicente Dam Raise at $140 million – the tallest dam raise in the United States – along with the $897 million BART extension to San Jose and its first build-finance project, the $260 million Gilcrease Expressway in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Engineering News-Record has named it the nation’s largest dam and reservoir builder and third largest builder of water supply.

Current work spans a similar range. Seismic retrofit and accessibility improvements to the Murray Street Bridge began in December 2024. A 19-mile zero-emission bus route launched in February 2025 across five Los Angeles communities. From February 2025 the company has been removing debris and restoring infrastructure in fire-affected Palisades neighbourhoods.

High-tech construction is the newer market – hyperscale facilities and advanced technology infrastructure – sitting alongside the resilient power and advanced treatment systems the firm ranks in. ENR West named Shimmick its 2026 California Contractor of the Year, citing strategic growth and expanding self-perform capabilities.

Headquarters: 530 Technology Drive, Suite 300, Irvine, CA 92618. California Contractor Licence No. 594575.