RK&K

RK&K has been in business since 1923 and keeps its headquarters on East Pratt Street in Baltimore. The firm provides planning, engineering, environmental and construction-phase services to public and private clients, with offices across the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and South Central states. Transportation is the largest piece: highways, structures, traffic, tolling. Water, utilities, site development and construction management fill out the list. The firm doesn’t publish a headcount on the pages we read. RK&K was civil engineer on Phase 1 of the M&T Bank Stadium Renovation in Baltimore, according to ENR’s regional Best Projects listing. That put a hometown firm on the sitework for the Ravens’ three-year, publicly funded upgrade.

The scale is more specific than the summary above allows. RK&K publishes 43 offices across 17 states. Pennsylvania carries the most at seven – Allentown, Harrisburg, King of Prussia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Williamsport and York – followed by Virginia with six and Florida with six. North Carolina has four, Tennessee four, South Carolina three, Texas three, Delaware three. Then single offices in Georgia, New Jersey, West Virginia, Washington D.C., and two well outside the stated region: Salt Lake City and Lakewood, Colorado.

That distribution says something about how the firm works. Transportation engineering is won agency by agency, and a state DOT generally wants a team with people already licensed and resident in the state. Seven Pennsylvania offices is what sustained PennDOT work looks like from the inside.

Alternative delivery is a named service line, covering design-build, construction manager at risk and public-private partnerships. This is worth noting because those three models change who carries design risk and when the price is fixed. A firm that lists them separately is signalling it works on the contractor’s side of the table as well as the owner’s.

The firm also runs a group for 3D BIM, drone survey and VR and AR visualisation. On a highway or interchange project those tools earn their keep at public meetings, where a flythrough does more to settle an objection than a plan sheet.

Six client markets are published alongside the transportation core: education, federal, healthcare, municipal, recreational and state. Recreational is the unexpected one, and it fits a firm that ends up doing the sitework under a stadium.

On culture RK&K is direct in a way most engineering firms are not, describing itself as low key and low ego, naming teamwork as a core value, and citing over 100 employee groups, clubs and annual events. It has also been voted a Top Workplace. For a job candidate weighing a century-old firm, that is the part of the website worth reading.

The headquarters is at 700 East Pratt Street, Suite 500, Baltimore, on 410-728-2900.