In recent years, directional drilling becomes more popular in petroleum industry due to its more exposure to reservoir. During wellbore trajectory design for directional drilling, more importance should be given on safety issues. Well-profile energy is the key parameter which can assure a safe and efficient wellbore trajectory through proper optimization. In this work, the Spotted Hyena Optimizer (SHO) is proposed and implemented for optimizing the well-profile energy and compared with another state of art method named Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The trajectory is mathematically formulated by using radius curvature method (RCM) considering 17 variables on which well-profile energy is depended. The SHO successfully obtained the optimum values of the 17 design variables which eventually given the minimum well-profile energy. The optimum well-profile energy obtained by SHO is 207.00 which is 18.28 better than PSO. Additionally, the sensitivity of the algorithm has been analysed by changing different operational parameter of SHO. It is observed that the efficiency of SHO increased with the increment in the number of search agents (hyenas). The minimum well-profile energy achieved through SHO ensure a less complex and safe wellbore trajectory. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.