Engineering at Remix

We’re united by the mission to transform transportation planning.

On the Remix team, we all share a deep appreciation for public transit and how technology can accelerate positive change in the space. We’re building a platform that enables cities to manage bikeshare programs, redesign bus networks, identify Metro Transit station improvement areas, and much more. Our team is composed of both technologists and folks from the private sector. Thanks to this powerful combination and our great customers, it’s easy for folks who don’t have a background in transportation to quickly feel inspired by the problems we are solving.

Whether it’s helping cities find efficiencies in street design or fueling the transition toward cleaner energy, we’re all driven by the fact that our work yields real-world change. It requires partnering closely with our customers, diving into what they do on a day-to-day basis, and understanding the pain points they are facing. The problem space is fun, unique, and complicated, but what keeps us going is knowing that we are helping many communities have the information they need to make decisions that help all of their members thrive.

We put a lot of care and thought into designing our product.

As a team, we care deeply about how design impacts our user. It isn’t just about coming up with beautiful mocks and having an engineer implement them – it’s a real cross-functional effort. We rely heavily on customer feedback as well as our product, engineering, and design teams.

Design has just as big of a seat at the leadership table as engineering and product. Teams are generally around 5-8 people and they all have an engineering, product, and design lead. This close collaboration with product and design ensures there’s lots of opportunity to prototype and helps us approach problems from a customer mindset. One great example of collaboration between engineers and designers is the shared design system used across all our products. Engineers and designers worked together to come up with a shared language (typography, component library, interactions, etc.) to both accelerate development and make it easier to maintain a high bar for design quality.

We’re committed to deep partnerships with our customers characterized by mutual learning and respect.

We believe strongly in the power of local governments to build livable cities, and are privileged to partner with planners around the world to achieve their safety, equity, and accessibility goals. Some of our customers include the Chicago Department of Transportation, Transport for London, and Ireland’s National Transit Authority – just to name a few – and it’s important that we’re empathetic in our approach to solving their pain points.

In pre-pandemic times, we encouraged team members to go on customer visits and see how transportation agencies operate behind the scenes. It was a great way to learn about our customers’ issues firsthand, and we look forward to doing so again when it’s safe to travel. By soliciting feedback from a variety of different stakeholders, we’re able to come up with innovative solutions that multiple customers can benefit from. For example, we heard and saw from our customers that information regarding their system ridership was often complex, raw, and challenging to quickly gain insights from. By partnering with several customers of various sizes, we were able to iterate upon a solution that was flexible to work with and display a variety of ridership data.

It’s fair to say our roadmap is largely driven by our customers’ needs. For instance, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized our roadmap needed to pivot given the challenges our customers were facing with reduced ridership and service levels. Closely listening to our customers and being responsive to their immediate needs allowed us to come up with creative solutions to solve problems such as transporting essential personnel around cities when service was limited. At the end of the day, it’s important to us to always put our customers first since solving the concrete issues they face ultimately helps the city and the broader community.

We believe diversity flourishes when inclusion happens.

It’s not enough to build a diverse team, we also have to make space for and actively celebrate our diversity. One of the ways we do this is with regular events, activities, workshops, and celebrations throughout the year. For example, during Black History Month, we focused on amplifying Black voices within our own team as well as supporting black-owned businesses and leaders in our community (we scheduled a team lunch over Zoom and encouraged Remixers to buy lunch from their favorite Black-owned business). We also had an hour-long conversation with London Breed, the first Black woman to serve as Mayor of San Francisco, and much more. One of our team members “Remix offers a space to share your story and celebrate your journey with others. Working here has been a constant reminder that no matter who you are or what your story is, space can always be made and differences can bring people together.” We encourage you to read the full blog post, “What Black History Month at Remix Means to Me,” here.

We also hired a third-party diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant to do an audit of our organization and come up with some recommendations to further our goal of becoming more inclusive. As a direct result, we decided to create employee-resource groups (ERGs). Even though we were only ~65 people at the time, we felt it would be a win to start ERGs such as womxn-eng, via-poc, litt-at-via, via-parents, the list goes on. Now that we joined Via in March of 2021, some of the groups are merged, but they continue to be a great place to bond with others, foster community, and find support.

Lastly, we encourage everyone who joins to create their own “user guide.” These are meant to serve as high-level overviews where you can talk about your core values, share where and when you feel you do your best work, your preferred communication style, and general expectations for how you can be best supported. While it’s optional, it’s a great exercise to help you think more intentionally about how you’d like other team members to understand you as a person.

We strive to be as diverse as the customers we serve and the communities they operate in.

In an ideal world, this means we’d look around the table at a meeting and not be able to distinguish our team members from our customers. Seeking out diversity not only helps make our team stronger, but it also helps us build the best product possible by incorporating different perspectives and challenging bias.

Whether it’s adding more women to the team (we’re currently around 35% on the engineering team) or people of different ages, ethnic backgrounds, parenting status, and abilities – diversity is extremely important to us. We’re proud to work with people who have different professional backgrounds and experiences. Engineers on the team come from small startups and large publicly traded tech companies; some started here as interns; some with computer science backgrounds. Still, we recognize that creating a diverse team is an ongoing process and one that we will always strive to improve upon.

Feedback is an integral part of how we improve.

At Remix, there are several ways we practice continuous feedback. It starts internally with wanting to help ourselves continue to get better everyday. We ship code as often as we can and it’s a team effort. We get input from other engineers before a change gets pushed to production. We value learning and collaborating with each other and believe giving feedback shouldn’t be tough. There’s a deep level of trust and respect for one another, which enables us to provide feedback that’s direct, honest, quick, and genuine. We do our best to take into consideration how team members prefer to receive feedback (something you can share in your user guide), whether that’s via direct message in Slack, in the moment, or a shared channel.

Creating tighter feedback loops also extends to how we interact with our customers. Before starting new projects we have a user discovery call to understand where we can help our customers improve their workflows. Whether customers share feedback in emails, calls, or in-person, we make sure to document it in a Slack channel so the entire company has visibility. This helps us define our roadmap, quickly squash bugs, and iterate on features. We also give a subset of our customers early access so they can beta test our new tools and help us develop the final product before it is released to General Access.

Our customers’ wins are our wins. Placing a large emphasis on open lines of communication with each other and with our customers ensures what we’re building has the intended effect and is the strongest product possible.

Regardless of role or experience, we all have something to share and learn from each other.

Clear, open communication is fundamental to how we work. We actively work to create opportunities to share context, regardless of seniority, role or location. If you have ideas about how to make something better, we want to hear it! Since we span several time zones, we make sure to update people in Slack, share Paper docs, and record important meetings so that everyone has the same context. For example, when there was uncertainty with the pandemic, leadership kept everyone informed with a weekly company update on Slack.

We also foster open communication with bi-weekly tech talks, where team members have the opportunity to share short demos or discuss what they’ve been working on. Engineers who are subject matter experts in a certain area or part of the stack also rotate every week and make themselves available to answer any questions during office hours.

Teams are organized based on the product area you work on, so we don’t have a dedicated front-end or back-end team. In order to encourage open dialogue across product teams, we have several different guilds composed of people with similar technical interests. Guild meetings generally happen every two weeks, and it’s a great time to discuss best practices, how we can improve on our architecture, or certain aspects of our system.

Collaboration is key, and you should feel comfortable going to anyone at any time if you’re feeling stuck or want to understand something better. Want to pair? There’s always someone willing to do so. We’re lucky to have a strong, talented team that is excited to help you learn new things and wants to learn from you, too.

We belong to the communities we serve.

All of us are impacted by the decisions that influence how we navigate our communities. This helps us empathize as we think about how changes made in our product will affect those around us. To build the best product we can, we engage with our community to broaden our understanding of the needs of its members. This could include hosting regional workshops to connect our transit planning community to each other, starting initiatives like Womxn in Urbanism to provide space to highlight the non-dominant voices in urbanism, or simply giving back to the community through programs like the Percent Pledge. Participating in our communities is a critical part of how we stay excited and accountable for building great products.