Building Engineering Culture Remotely

Remote work is here to stay. How do you build a strong engineering culture when your team is distributed across time zones?

Engineering culture isn't about ping pong tables or free snacks. It's about how decisions get made, how problems get solved, and how people work together. And those things are harder to build when your team is distributed.

But it's not impossible. In fact, some of the best engineering cultures we've seen are fully remote. Here's how they do it.

What Is Engineering Culture?

Before we talk about building it remotely, let's define what we mean:

• How decisions are made: Is it top-down? Consensus? Data-driven?
• How problems are solved: Do people collaborate? Work in silos? Escalate immediately?
• How knowledge is shared: Is it documented? Verbal? Tribal?
• How quality is maintained: Code reviews? Testing? Processes?
• How people are supported: Mentorship? Growth opportunities? Work-life balance?

These are the things that define culture, and they're all possible remotely — if you're intentional about it.

The Challenges of Remote Culture

Remote work creates specific challenges:

1. Spontaneous Communication Disappears

In an office, you overhear conversations, bump into people at the coffee machine, and have impromptu whiteboard sessions. Remote work eliminates these serendipitous interactions.

2. Context Gets Lost

When everyone's in different places, it's harder to know what's happening. People miss context that would be obvious in an office.

3. Trust Is Harder to Build

Trust comes from working together, and that's harder when you rarely see each other. Remote teams need to be more intentional about building relationships.

4. Time Zones Create Friction

When your team spans multiple time zones, synchronous communication becomes difficult. Everything needs to be more structured.

Building Culture Remotely: The Framework

1. Default to Async, But Make Sync Count

Most communication should be asynchronous — written, documented, and accessible later. But you still need synchronous time for relationship building and complex discussions.

Async for: Status updates, code reviews, documentation, decisions that don't need immediate input

Sync for: 1:1s, team retrospectives, architecture discussions, relationship building

2. Document Everything

In a remote team, documentation isn't nice-to-have — it's essential. If it's not written down, it doesn't exist.

• Decision logs: Why did we make this choice? What were the alternatives?
• Architecture docs: How does the system work? Why was it built this way?
• Process docs: How do we deploy? How do we do code reviews? What's our on-call process?
• Team knowledge: Who knows what? How do I get help?

3. Create Deliberate Connection Points

You can't rely on spontaneous interactions, so you need to create them intentionally:

• Virtual coffee chats: Pair people up for 30-minute informal chats
• Team social time: Regular non-work video calls (games, trivia, just chatting)
• Pair programming: Not just for code — for relationship building too
• Retrospectives: Regular time to reflect and connect as a team

4. Make Values Explicit

In an office, values are communicated through observation. Remote teams need to be explicit:

• Write down your engineering values
• Reference them in code reviews and decisions
• Celebrate when people exemplify them
• Call out when they're violated

5. Over-Communicate

In remote work, you can't over-communicate. Share context liberally:

• Status updates: What are you working on? What's blocking you?
• Decisions: Why did you make this choice?
• Learnings: What did you discover? What went wrong?
• Celebrations: What went well? Who helped?

Practical Tactics

Daily Standups (Async)

Use async standups in Slack or your project tool. Everyone posts: what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, any blockers. This creates visibility without requiring everyone to be online at the same time.

Weekly Team Sync

One synchronous meeting per week for the whole team. Use it for relationship building, not status updates. Maybe start with 15 minutes of casual chat, then discuss architecture or process improvements.

Code Review Culture

Code reviews are your primary mechanism for knowledge sharing and quality in a remote team. Make them count:

• Review within 24 hours
• Explain the "why" behind suggestions
• Use reviews as teaching moments
• Celebrate good code, not just critique

Documentation Standards

Set clear expectations for documentation:

• Every PR should update relevant docs
• Architecture decisions go in ADRs (Architecture Decision Records)
• Onboarding docs are mandatory and kept current
• Runbooks for common operations

Measuring Remote Culture

How do you know if your remote culture is working?

• Knowledge distribution: Can anyone answer questions, or are there single points of knowledge?
• Response times: How quickly do people respond to async communication?
• Participation: Do people actively contribute to discussions?
• Retention: Are people staying? Do they feel connected?
• Velocity: Is the team moving fast? Are blockers resolved quickly?

The Bottom Line

Building engineering culture remotely requires intention. You can't rely on osmosis. But with deliberate practices — documentation, communication, connection, and explicit values — you can build a culture that's actually stronger than many in-person teams.

The key is recognizing that remote culture is different, not worse. Embrace the differences, and you'll build something special.