Employee Spotlight Series: Chase Tingley

Here at Lilt, we’re passionate about helping localization leaders tackle big challenges and move the industry forward.

Internally, we’re just as focused on building a culture of inspiring and motivated individuals to help build the foundations to make that a reality. In our Employee Spotlight series, we’re excited to highlight the talented Lilt employees (or Liltonians, as we like to call ourselves) that have helped us get to where we are now.

This week, we’re excited to introduce Chase Tingley, principal software engineer at Lilt. We sat down with Chase to learn more about his background, what his day to day looks like, and what music he listens to most often.

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

I am part of the team that builds and maintains our back-end services, things like the translation memory and terminology services. My days are complicated - it's a split between working with the product team on designs for the roadmap, reviewing code or talking through ideas with other engineers, or touching base with the solutions team about how best to handle certain types of customer content. Then, writing some code of my own with whatever time is left over.

What led you to join Lilt?

I'd been involved for years with the Okapi framework, which is an open source project that Lilt uses to implement part of our import/export code. John DeNero and I knew each other in high school in Minnesota, so when he saw my name he emailed me to ask for advice about how to integrate it -- this was probably in 2016. After that we just kept in touch, although it took a couple years before I joined full-time.

What do you like to do outside of work? How do you maintain a good work/life balance?

I have two children, so there's always something going on.

Out of Lilt's company values (Meticulousness, Quickness, Humility, Toughness), which speaks to you most and why?

Probably humility. Localization is a good proxy for the world at large in that neither of them always makes a lot of sense.

What's one fact or skill that you've learned while working at Lilt?

Kubernetes! When the company was smaller, I ended up having to do a lot of cloud engineering, and I'm really glad now that I had that hands-on experience.

Since joining Lilt, do you think of translation/localization differently?

Will I sound too jaded if I say "no"? But I don't think so -- I'd been around translation for a while, so I was familiar with a lot of the effort involved. I think my understanding of how it could be done better has definitely changed, though.

What's the best career advice you've ever received?

One day in kindergarten, another kid said to me, "Speak up, or the world will pass you by." Later that day (I swear this is true) the bus driver taking me home drove straight past my house when I didn't tell him to stop, and I got home late. That's probably the best advice I've ever received, although I'm not always the best at following it.

What languages do you speak or have you studied?

French through high school, two years of Japanese in college.

Do you like to listen to music while you work? If so, what kind?

I tend listen to certain things on repeat to provoke a particular rhythm in my brain when I'm focusing; I'm very picky about this. Recently, both War on Drugs albums, Mike Doughty's "Haughty Melodic", and Paul Winter's "Canyon" (because apparently I'm now my own dad) have been getting a lot of play. If I ever absolutely need to work through something complicated, I put on the soundtrack to Satoshi Kon's movie "Paprika". It makes me feel like my brain is floating in space.

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Keep an eye out for our upcoming posts in both our Translator and Employee Spotlight posts! We'll continue to highlight people from across the company and our wonderful translator community.

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