Last year, we started a series highlighting the amazing Lilt employees (or Liltonians, as we like to call ourselves). We’re excited to continue that series this year with some of our team members helping to pave the way for a multilingual global future. Get to know more about the faces behind the work, their backgrounds, what makes them tick, and what makes Lilt the place for them.

Meet Sagar Kaja, a Senior Backend Engineer at Lilt who helps build Lilt's technical localization services for our customers' global experiences. We sat down with Sagar to learn more about his background, his experiences at Lilt, and what he does to recharge outside of work.

What's your role at Lilt, and what does your day-to-day look like?

I’m a Software Engineer here at Lilt. My day can look different depending on what projects I'm working on, but generally involves reviewing code from colleagues, troubleshooting issues, solving them and coding for new product features, and working with the team to define and plan upcoming work. 

What is/was your favorite project to work on at Lilt and why?

I helped design and implement the new Default Roster for Production, which enables one consolidated linguist management center for the Lilt Production team to manage linguist assignment for projects across every Lilt customer. This should allow Product Managers to manage Translators easily.

I also worked on a Tag merge issue which helped me understand how we store and process markups when we put a document through our system.

What led you to join Lilt?

Combining Machine Learning and Human Translation to translate a document is intriguing. That's the main reason I was interested in pursuing the opportunity. Lilt also uses a technology stack I have never worked on before, and it is an excellent opportunity to learn new things. So far, I am not disappointed.

Describe life at Lilt in three words.

Fun, engaging, and career-building.

With every project, I'm able to learn new things, help build meaningful technological tools, and work cross-functionally with different teams and people.

What is your "happy place" outside of work? What do you like to do for fun?

I have a beautiful wife, two dogs, and an active one-year-old. I usually don't have much time left, but any time I spend with my family outside is my happy place. I love biking; I haven't been on one in a year and a half.

What is your favorite quote or personal mantra?

"Aim for stars if you fall you'll land on the moon."

What Lilt value do you resonate with the most? (Toughness, Humility, Quickness, and Meticulousness)

Meticulousness: As a back-end engineer, when issues come up, I should be very meticulous about whether the issue is caused by the code that we currently have or a user foresight that resulted in the case. It's very important to anticipate these issues when working on resolving a problem and being confident with the code we write.

If you could learn to speak any language(s), what would it be and why?

Russian, I am still working on it. We are a trilingual family; my wife speaks Russian, I speak Telugu, and we speak English. I would love for us to talk to our son in any of the three languages interchangeably.

Thanks for chatting, Sagar! Want to join our growing team and help build the future of global experience? We’d love to talk to you if so. Check out our careers page to find the right role for you and learn more about how you can get involved.