Meet the Team: Trisha Aguinaldo

Welcome to Reggora’s “Meet the Team” series! Reggora is powered by a team of smart, hard working people dedicated to the mission of appraisal innovation, and we’ve all taken very different paths to get here. In this series, we’ll introduce you to different members of the Reggora family. This week features Trisha Aguinaldo, who joined Reggora in April of 2019 as a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer, before being promoted to Lead QA Engineer, then Full-Stack Developer, then Head of Quality Assurance where she works today.

Trisha Aguinaldo: Head of Quality Assurance

Q: Tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up? Go to school? What do you enjoy doing?

A: I was born in Quezon City, Philippines. Fun fact: My family is related to General Emilio Aguinaldo, the first and youngest President of the Philippines. In my home country, my family lived paycheck to paycheck. Despite that, I grew up very happy. In the summer, my sisters and I would go to my grandfather’s farm in Laguna climbing big mango trees, swimming, and eating fresh food.

When I was ten years old, my family immigrated to Massachusetts for a chance at a better life. I struggled a lot to fit in a completely different world. In college, I was set to become a Biologist with an interest in Pre-Med. But my experiences with racism, violence, microaggressions, and poverty led me to a degree in Public Health and Sociology at UMass Amherst. Post-undergrad, I quickly realized that I was not suited for that career. So three years ago, I made the switch to become a web developer by attending a remote programming bootcamp. Pre-Covid, I enjoyed regularly attending tech events in Boston and volunteering when I can. Nowadays, you can find me occasionally helping junior developers break into the tech scene or more likely, filming my next Tiktok dances.

Q: Where did you work before Reggora?

A: Prior to Reggora, I was primarily working as an Administrative Support at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. At DFCI, patients had the option to get their treatments during the weekend. My role was to help upper management curate an efficient workflow for clinical staff and providers, so the Institute can operate during the weekend. I helped standardize what they should expect through data gathering, process refinement of administrative procedures, and complex coordination of patient treatment schedules. As a result, the culture shifted over time at the clinic so everyone knew what to expect during their weekend infusion appointments. In addition, some of the staff actually look forward to work during the weekend.

Q: Why did you join the Reggora team?

A: I fell in love with the mission and the people at Reggora. I was looking for a company that had a “do-good” mission, a clear vision, and a place where I can grow. The company checked all the boxes and even exceeded my expectations. Among those reasons are that the technology stack fit me well and everyone I talked to was incredibly talented, high-performing, and down-to-earth.

Q: What do you do here at Reggora?

A: My spicy career progression has landed me a career in management. Currently, I lead a team of talented QA Engineers as the Head of Quality Assurance. I am in charge of aligning the goals of the company with the team, providing leadership, expertise, and making sure we keep the rocketship rocking when it comes to Quality Assurance. In addition to this, I help with the hiring and onboarding process and sometimes pick up low-priority full-stack tickets to keep my programming skills sharp.
However, I started off at the company as a QA engineer. Striving to meet the requirements of each title change as the Lead QA Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, and now to my current role as the Head of QA at Reggora. My time at Reggora is filled with many first milestones. I am as motivated to do well on my first day as my present day. But I am also quite nervous - imposter syndrome never really goes away! My goal this year is to continue breaking down daunting tasks into bite sized pieces and to always choose progress over perfection.

Q: Can you talk about how Reggora has grown or changed since you’ve been here?

A: In the less than two years since I started, Reggora has gone from 20 people at the company, to now nearing 100. One of the challenges we’ve faced during this time was growing scalably. For example, as our number of clients grew, it was important to structure our engineering department in a way that was capable of responding to increasing numbers of client requests in a timely manner. Through lots of hiring and some shuffling around, the team was structured in a way made up of engineering sub-teams (or “pods” as we call them). This allows our engineers to focus on a specific platform or workflow, leading to more ownership and specialty, and has been highly effective.

I also saw the importance of having invested leaders who value transparency and growth. Despite the hardship from Covid, our leadership team continues to be collaborative with our employees. They listen to feedback and have the best-interest of not just the health of the company, but also our individual employees. In all that I do, I hope to continue being a positive contributing force at Reggora.

Q: How have you handled the switch to remote work?

A: I have a very comfortable work-from-home routine. I’ve got my desk setup near my adorable plants and we all get plenty of sunshine. I also love that leadership continues to encourage our teams to practice good communication. To me, this means providing as much context as possible to issues or goals that our engineers are focused on. Our team is very good at setting up recurring check-ins with each other to increase transparency and foster rapport. I definitely prefer speaking directly via Slack calls or Zooms to make things more personal, but we try to strike that delicate balance of should “we jump on a video session” or “can this be in a Slack message” for everyone’s sanity.

Q: What is the best part of your job?

A: The best part of the job are my co-workers. I feel incredibly blessed to work with such high-performing, dedicated, and amazing humans. This is not only a big nod to our recruitment and hiring departments for searching and identifying competitive candidates, but also a testament to the hard work of everyone at Reggora. Cheers to all the energy and effort that everyone puts in daily to keep Reggora rocking!

Trisha, we cannot thank you enough for your hard work and leadership throughout the past (almost) two years. You have played a vital role in the ongoing development and innovation of our platform, which cannot be understated. Thank you for sharing some of your story with us today.

We’re continuing to hire across all departments here at Reggora. To learn about joining the team and see our open roles, visit www.reggora.com/careers.