Each year, we select an employee-owner who goes above and beyond to display core values. This year, Ryan Whipple was selected as our Employee-Owner of the Year by his fellow employee-owners and our Enterprise Leadership Team. Ryan is a Senior Consultant out of our San Diego office. He joined Parametrix in 2024.
Ryan holds the 2026 Employee-Owner of the Year award at the Employee-Ownership Celebration.
He answers a few questions about his career and his experience at Parametrix.
Tell us about your career. What inspired you to pursue this field?
I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, ready to change the world. The world had other plans, and they involved a CPK (California Pizza Kitchen) server’s apron.
The Great Recession hit right as I finished school, so I headed back home to San Diego and moved back in with my parents. I figured I’d have an engineering job within a couple of months and be on my way. Instead, I spent the next few years piecing together whatever work I could find: serving pizza, substitute teaching at a local high school, directing my church choir, and, once Lyft arrived in San Diego, driving part-time.
I didn’t know it when I started, but Lyft would become my first, very prolonged, traffic engineering field study.
But traffic wasn’t what I set out to do. In college, I’d always been drawn to water. So, sprinkled in between all these side jobs, I kept my senior design project alive pro bono: a land use and levee safety framework for Sherman Island in the Sacramento Delta. In 2012, our team won the Delta Alliance Young Professionals Award and presented our work at the United Nations Rio+20 Sustainability Conference. I was sure that an international award and a free trip to Rio de Janeiro to present at a UN conference would lead to job offers galore. It didn’t.
What it did get me was a volunteer position with the City of Chula Vista, California, Traffic and Stormwater Division. I thought, “Great, stormwater, we’re making progress.” Then I met my supervisor, the City’s principal TRAFFIC engineer.
As a mentor, he taught me that flow is flow and that traffic is basically water that honks. The principles I’d learned in school still applied, just in a much more human way.
Within a year, that volunteer role turned into an internship, a junior engineer job with the City of San Diego, and then a full-time position at a traffic consulting firm, where I soaked up everything from operations to signals to PS&E. I was hooked.
Ryan presenting on “Plangineering” at ITE Western District Conference in Portland, OR, July 2023.
What has your experience been like at Parametrix?
Even before day one, I knew that Parametrix was a place that takes care of its employee-owners. I was shipped a docking station, two monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, and headphones – the whole kit and caboodle – and IT had me ready to go before I officially started. That support carried me from day one in my bedroom office all the way to the opening of our San Diego office.
Then came the people. One of my first conversations was with a fellow traffic engineer in a different region. What shocked me was how quickly we got to how we could work together, how I could support his efforts, and how he could help me grow things in California.
It was almost jarring how comfortable it felt. Colleagues in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and the Bay Area met me the same way. That’s when it clicked: we are the shareholders. My success really was everyone’s success, and that gave me the confidence to jump in and help project managers in other regions with their clients.
Then Parametrix showed up for my family. Our son was born in September 2023, five months before I joined, and I hadn’t taken any parental leave yet. Parametrix let me take a few weeks up front and then spread the rest across his first year, one to three days a week.
Two and a half years in, the skepticism is gone. When I’m out in the marketplace, I’m not selling Parametrix’s values. I’m just describing what it’s like to work here.
Collaboration came through strongly in your nomination. What strategies or habits have helped you create that kind of environment across offices or regions?
Most of my habits come back to the idea that the people you work with matter as much as the work itself.
Leave zero doubt and over-communicate. Always circle back, align on expectations, and communicate more than you probably need to. This is a great way to earn trust.
Vision Zero Study field visit for the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.
Fill the gaps you see. Reach out and offer your skills when you see that you can be of use – whether that’s training junior staff or helping fill a project need.
Leave every conversation better than you found it. I promised myself I’d carry this mentality into every interaction: to see the dignity in every person, to remember that we’re all in this together, and to leave every room and every conversation a little better than I found it. Whether it’s a Teams call with someone I’ve never met, a tough conversation with a client, or a quick question from a team member, each one is a chance to show care and appreciation.
Ryan networking with former colleagues at San Diego APA’s Annual Awards dinner. Photo courtesy of San Diego American Planning Association.
That’s still the habit underneath all the others. Over-communicating, treating all clients like my own, filling gaps when I see them: they’re all just ways of keeping that promise.
What do you enjoy most about being an employee-owner at Parametrix?
It’s easy to point to the fact that we’re all shareholders, and that does drive us. But what I enjoy most is the talent and initiative of my colleagues across Parametrix. When everyone has a stake in the outcome, you get people who bring their best to everything, whether it’s a plan set or report, a client relationship, or a proposal due at 5 p.m.
Ryan Whipple and Pete Ruscitti at the 2026 San Diego APA Awards Dinner. Photo courtesy of San Diego APA.