After receiving his master degree in civil engineering at the Technical University of Delft in 1999, Jorrit de Groot started working at Hydronamic, the “in house” engineering company of Boskalis. Specialised in coastal and river engineering, he became a project engineer at the Gorai River Re-Excavation project soon afterwards. There he designed and evaluated the works and supervised the on-site survey department. During his stay in Bangladesh he also worked on a feasibility study of dredging the old Brahmaputra, a tributary of the Jamuna.