He learned early that the most important infrastructure is invisible. The power that lights a city, the current that runs beneath a highway, the cable buried sixty feet below a street in Los Angeles or Phoenix or San Diego. That invisibility suited him. Dion Emami has spent four decades building things people will never see, and he considers that a measure of success.
Finding Ground in an Uncertain World
Dianoush Dion Emami was thirteen years old when his parents made the decision that would define the rest of his life. Iran in the mid-1970s was a country approaching rupture. Political and economic uncertainty had already begun to reshape daily life, and his family saw clearly that the path forward for their son required leaving. He was sent to England first, where he completed secondary school. Then came the United States, and the University of Southern California, and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering that he would finish in 1981.
The separation from his family lasted years. Iran’s revolution and its aftermath made reunion difficult, sometimes impossible. It was not until 1983 that the family was able to come together again in the United States. By then, Emami was already working. He had been recruited directly out of USC by Bechtel Power Corporation, where he joined as an electrical engineer and was assigned to nuclear power plant projects, including Arizona Nuclear Power and San Onofre Generating Station. The work demanded precision of a kind that leaves no margin for error. He would carry that standard with him for the rest of his career.
While at Bechtel, Emami continued his education at USC, pursuing graduate coursework in transmission and distribution systems. The dual life of an engineer working full-time while advancing his technical credentials was demanding, but it reflected the temperament that would come to define him. He did not do things halfway.
The Making of a Technical Leader
The move from Bechtel to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power gave Emami a new vantage point. As a Contract Administrator, he developed and evaluated technical specifications, requests for proposals, and contract recommendations for electrical distribution projects. It was here that he began to understand not just the technical dimensions of the utility sector but the procurement and contractual architecture that determines how projects are built, by whom, and to what standard.
That understanding deepened considerably during his next chapter. In 1997, Emami joined Henkels and McCoy, Inc. as Director of Business Development, a role he would hold for seventeen years. Based in the western United States, he managed business operations across more than thirty-five utility clients. Budgets, proposals, human resources, and client relationships all fell within his purview. He drove expansion into new lines of business and built the regional client portfolio that would give him an unusually complete view of how the utility construction industry actually functioned at scale.
By the time he left Henkels and McCoy in 2014, Emami had spent nearly two decades at one of the largest utility infrastructure contractors in the country. He had the technical credentials, the client relationships, and the operational experience. He had one more thing to build.
Parkia, Inc. and the Western Grid
Parkia, Inc. is an electrical engineering and construction firm operating across the western United States. Since becoming its Chief Executive Officer in 2014, Emami has directed the engineering and construction of numerous underground transmission projects ranging from 69kV to 230kV. The client list reads like a map of California’s power infrastructure: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, and Arizona Public Service.
Underground transmission work at this voltage level is specialized, complex, and unforgiving. These are not projects that welcome improvisation. Every specification, every installation sequence, every quality checkpoint matters. Emami brought to Parkia the same framework he had been building since Bechtel: technical rigor first, and everything else in service of that standard.
As executive sponsor, he continues to guide major engineering, construction, and EPC initiatives from concept through completion. The role places him at the intersection of client relationships, technical delivery, and company culture, three areas he treats as inseparable. A firm that does technical work well but fails its clients, or one that succeeds commercially but loses its people, is not the kind of organization he set out to build.
He has placed particular emphasis on safety culture as something that must be cultivated continuously, not declared and forgotten. In an industry where the work itself carries inherent risk, that emphasis is not incidental. It is structural.
A Career Built on Compounding Experience
What distinguishes Emami’s professional arc is not any single position or project but the way each stage built on the one before it. The nuclear work at Bechtel gave him standards and precision. The contracting role at LADWP gave him procurement fluency. The seventeen years at Henkels and McCoy gave him operational scale. And Parkia gave him the space to apply all of it without constraint.
Forty years in, the complexity of the problems he works on has not diminished. If anything, the energy sector in California and across the western grid is facing a period of transformation that requires exactly the kind of experience he has accumulated: underground systems, transmission capacity, grid resilience, and the ability to execute projects with the major utilities that are navigating that transformation.
He holds several professional engineering and construction licenses, including Class A, Class B, C-10, C-61/D31, and C31, a range that reflects the breadth of work Parkia undertakes and the regulatory landscape in which it operates.
The Other Infrastructure
Outside of his professional work, Emami describes a life grounded in family. He has been married for over thirty years. His two children are a source of clear and consistent pride. He enjoys hiking and swimming. These are not incidental details. For someone who left home at thirteen and spent years separated from his family by circumstances entirely outside his control, the life he has built in California carries a weight that a resume cannot fully convey.
He met his wife in 1994, and the family they built together has remained, in his telling, the foundation beneath everything else. The infrastructure that holds the rest up. The part that most people never see, and that he would not trade for any project he has delivered.
What to take from Dianoush Dion Emami
Dion Emami’s career in electrical engineering and construction spans a period of significant change in the American utility sector. From the nuclear facilities of the early 1980s to the underground transmission networks of today, he has operated at the technical frontier of an industry that now faces its most consequential period of transformation.
Grid modernization, electrification, and the demand for reliable underground transmission infrastructure across the western United States are not abstract challenges. They are engineering problems that require the kind of hard-won, compound expertise that takes decades to build. Emami has spent those decades building it. Parkia, Inc. is the enterprise through which he continues to put it to use.
