Optery vs DeleteMe for Structural Engineering Principals

State licensing boards typically maintain a public lookup for professional engineers, sometimes including a business address and license history. That's outside what either removal service touches, but it's worth checking what your board's listing shows before deciding how much additional cleanup the commercial broker side actually needs.

A firm where principals have practiced under one consistent professional name, without major relocations or career changes, tends to get solid coverage from Optery's ongoing, automated model without much ongoing management. That fits a firm that wants every principal covered but doesn't have someone dedicated to managing individual privacy cases.

A senior principal who's held licenses in multiple states, worked for several firms over a long career, or has a name that's spelled or formatted differently across different public records benefits from DeleteMe's human-run process, where a caseworker can reconcile those variations more reliably than automated matching typically does.

When a project the firm worked on becomes controversial, a structural issue, a contested zoning approval, a community fighting a permit, the engineer of record can become a public target for frustration that may have little to do with their actual role on the project. A privacy program that's already running before a controversy happens is far more useful than trying to start one reactively once a project is already in the news, since exposure spreads fast once a name is attached to a public dispute.

Neither service touches the state licensing board's public lookup or the permit filings themselves, both of which are government records a firm generally can't opt out of while remaining licensed to practice. What is worth reviewing is whether the licensing board allows a business address rather than a personal one, since many principals default to whatever address was on file when they first got licensed, often years before joining the current firm.

An engineering firm organized as a professional corporation or LLC has its own public formation filing, separate from any individual principal's license record, and if a founding principal used a home address before the firm had an office, that address remains discoverable through the state's records regardless of how clean everything else becomes. A commercial registered agent fixes this specific, often-missed gap, and it's worth handling at the same time as the broker-site cleanup rather than as an afterthought.

Not every engineer at the firm needs to be covered the same way. Principals who regularly serve as engineer of record on public projects carry the most direct exposure and should be first in line; project engineers and junior staff who support the work but don't sign drawings carry less, at least until they're promoted into a role that does. Budgeting the removal service around actual signing authority, rather than covering the whole staff roster uniformly from day one, is a reasonable way to sequence the rollout without either overspending or leaving the most exposed people uncovered.

Operations leaders who end up managing this kind of program, alongside their other responsibilities, earn a median of roughly $105,000 a year¹, a fair anchor for how much internal coordination time it's reasonable to budget for running a firm-wide privacy program properly rather than treating it as a five-minute signup task.

A sensible order for extending coverage:

1. Start with principals who regularly serve as engineer of record on public projects, since their names sit on stamped drawings and permit filings.
2. Add every licensed principal who shares engineer of record duty, rather than covering only the most senior partner.
3. Bring in project engineers and junior staff when they are promoted into roles that sign drawings.
4. Review the licensing board listing and the firm's formation filing for home addresses, which neither service can change.

A firm that already carries professional liability coverage and has a documented risk-management process is usually well positioned to fold executive privacy into that same conversation, since the underlying goal, reducing the firm's and its principals' exposure to disputes that follow a project into the public eye, is the same one liability coverage exists for. Framing the privacy program as part of that broader risk posture, rather than as a standalone personal-security purchase, tends to make it easier to get buy-in from principals who might otherwise see it as optional.