It’s a Chimed Life: Meet Valentina Trujillo
“I used to hear that I didn’t look like an engineer,” says Valentina (Tina) Trujillo of being an engineer in her native Venezuela. “Culturally, there were a lot of gender biases and barriers to entry in the software engineering world there.” Tina wanted to work in the Venezuelan public sector and improve things for the troubled country, but when she got an offer to move to Vancouver for a job, she took it. “There weren’t many opportunities for what I wanted to do in Venezuela, so I moved,” she says.
Becoming an engineer
When Tina was close to graduating from high school, she already knew that she liked math — but didn’t know what a career in it might look like. “I didn’t want to be in academia, I wanted to work in the industry,” she says. “When I started taking Computer Science courses, it was the perfect blend of math and a career path for me.”
As one of the only women in her class, Tina knew what to expect as she entered the tech world — and she didn’t take it lightly. “I feel responsible for representing women in tech and engineering,” she explains, “I hope it can inspire other women to join the field.”
Tina feels inspired every day because of the problem-solving she gets to do. For her, coding isn’t just about numbers, it’s about theories and understanding how things are made — and how best to make them. “I love that in engineering, you have a problem in front of you, many possible outcomes, and you get to iterate in order to find the best solution,” Tina says. “I’m passionate about finding solutions for user-facing problems and understanding how my work impacts the business,” she adds.
A love of technical work — and having an impact
Tina started her engineering career in fintech, tried out a management path, but ultimately, she moved into technical leadership positions instead of managing a team. While she loves people and collaborating to solve problems, being a manager wasn’t for her. “I realized I’m a deeply technical person, and I feel the most fulfillment from solving technical problems,” she says.
When Chime reached out to Tina, she was familiar with us but didn’t feel sure she wanted to make a career change. “As a parent, I overthink every change I might make in my life because it has ripple effects and can change life’s circumstances for my family,” she explains. “Ultimately, I decided that joining Chime was the right move because of the growth opportunity it represented and the sheer reach of the product.”
“I wanted to join Chime because if I’m going to build a product, I want it to be something that’s going to be massively used — and Chime is.”
Then there’s Chime’s mission, which resonated — and still resonates — deeply with Tina. “I’ve always tried to put myself in others’ shoes,” she says. “During a Chime outage, I went through social media responses from our members to understand the impact it had on their lives,” she explains. “I saw things like ‘I couldn’t buy diapers for my baby,’ and realized that the work we’re doing truly matters to peoples’ everyday lives — I feel good about doing that work.”
Solving problems, day in and day out
In addition to feeling good about her work, the technical challenges keep her on her toes. “The traffic Chime sees on a daily basis is huge, so building products for that size of an audience is always interesting,” she says.
In her day-to-day, Tina helps to build products to solve our members’ problems. She starts by understanding what issues they’re facing with a product manager and then delves into the system to understand why the user is having their current experience. “Sometimes it’s a bug, sometimes it’s intentional,” she explains. “Once I understand the problem, I start figuring out what we should build to fix it.”
Tina also considers a bigger question when solving a problem: should she and her team build something specifically for the issue at hand, or should their solution extend beyond the scope to affect other features and experiences for members? For that, she interacts with many different teams and engineers to gain an understanding of what’s going on. “I am the first to admit that I don’t know every detail about every problem, so I ask for people to point out my blind spots, give suggestions, and provide feedback so that we address the problem in the right way,” she says.
During her evaluation and solutioning process, Tina documents everything. “I’m a very visual person, so I diagram everything and keep documentation about our decision-making process,” she says. “It’s helpful for me and will serve other engineers in the future.”
Once she and her team decide on a solution, she presents it to the architectural committee — a group of senior engineers and our CTO, Ryan King — for feedback and a thumbs up. With approval, Tina moves forward and turns her solution into a reality, pushing it to production and then monitoring it for its impact.
A supportive team
Because her work is so cross-functional, Tina works with Chimers across our three offices, but she really loves the Vancouver team. “Before the pandemic, we would always go for walks, get coffee, and sit together for lunch — we always have stuff to talk about, whether it’s work-related or not,” she says. “Our team is so supportive and has really stepped up during this time that we can’t be physically together.”
The support of Tina’s team has meant more to her since she’s been working from home and parenting. When the pandemic hit, her daughter’s daycare was closed for 3 months, and Tina was grateful for her team’s understanding of her circumstances. “After all, many Chimers have kids, and we understand each others’ realities,” she explains. “At one point, I blocked off hours during the day that I needed to spend with my daughter and worked in the evenings instead, and my team was so empathetic to my request to do so.”
When she reflects on her decision to join Chime, Tina knows it was the right thing — for the way she feels supported and the work she gets to do each day. “I may have left Venezuela and my dreams to improve the public sector, but I love that I’m helping millions of people every day — and that I work with a team that’s super supportive of me, my family, and my ambitions to improve peoples’ lives.”
