Building Global Engineering Teams: Lessons from Managing 120 Engineers Across 8 Countries

Managing a co-located team of 10 is about communication. Managing a distributed team of 120 across 8 time zones is about systems. The principles are the same; the execution is different.

The Communication cloud infrastructure design

At FLIR, our engineering organization spanned Portland (firmware), Toronto (software and e-commerce), Edinburgh (cloud), and Taipei (QA). The first year, we relied on email and weekly video calls. Coordination was slow and context was constantly lost.

We rebuilt the communication cloud infrastructure design around three principles: async-first (decisions documented in writing, video calls reserved for real-time discussion), single source of truth (Confluence for documentation, Jira for work tracking no email threads for decisions), and time zone awareness (all-hands calls rotated to share the inconvenient timing fairly). The switch from synchronous to async-first increased output by approximately 25%.

The Timezone Overlap Strategy

With 8 time zones, no single meeting time works for everyone. Any meeting requiring attendance from more than 2 regions needed a recording and written summary. Decisions couldn't wait for real-time attendance. We designated "collaboration hours" 2-hour windows where all regions had reasonable overlap for synchronous work.

Building Culture Remotely

Culture is transmitted through behavior, not mission statements. Engineering wins were announced in all-hands, not just local team meetings. Escalation paths were clear across regions. Shared vocabulary prevented translation overhead.

The cultural moment that most changed our distributed effectiveness: when a firmware engineer in Taipei flagged a bug found by a QA engineer in Edinburgh before it reached the e-commerce team in Toronto. That cross-regional collaboration was the goal, and celebrating it publicly reinforced the behavior.

Performance Management Across Borders

Performance criteria are behavior-based, not personality-based. Managers in each region are trained on local context and cultural norms. Skip-level conversations with all engineers annually gave me direct signal, not filtered information. At 120 engineers, the risk of disconnection from ground-level engineering reality is real. The skip-levels kept me honest.