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Engineering culture is a system: incentives, habits, standards, and how decisions get made when things break. On SphereCast, host Adin Heric sits down with Krzysztof Ras to explain how to design that system from zero – and evolve it through scale across the Middle East and China.

Kris breaks down what “culture” really looks like before the first engineer is hired, how the first 100 days set long-term norms, and how leadership must shift as teams grow from a handful of builders into distributed organizations.

In this episode, we cover:

• What “culture” means before the team even exists
• The first 100 days: what to prioritize (hiring, values, process, delivery)
• How culture is defined through daily behavior, not decks
• Speed vs. stability: architecture, testing, and discipline under pressure
• Lessons from building teams in the Middle East
• What China’s execution pace changes about leadership expectations
• Leading across languages and time zones while maintaining trust and shared values
• How AI is reshaping engineering culture – where it helps, and where it can harm collaboration

Whether you’re a founder hiring your first engineers, a CTO scaling a team, or a leader managing globally distributed development, this episode offers practical frameworks for building a culture that holds up under growth.

Key Topics: engineering culture, scaling engineering teams, first 100 days, hiring and values, engineering leadership, clean architecture, testing discipline, startup vs scale-up, distributed teams, cross-cultural leadership, Middle East tech leadership, China tech leadership, AI in software development, SphereCast, Sphere Inc.