%20(1).png)
SheCanCode's Spilling The T
SheCanCode's Spilling The T
Jelena’s Journey to Tech Leadership: Innovation, Data, and Resilience
In this episode, we dive into the fascinating career journey of Jelena Riley, Technical Manager at Viator, a tech leader who has navigated the dynamic world of software engineering, data systems, and public-facing platforms. From studying Numerical and Applied Mathematics in Serbia to knocking on doors for her first opportunity in software engineering, she has worked her way up through roles in retail banking, hedge funds, and tech giants. Now a tech manager at Viator - a Tripadvisor company - she oversees a team of engineers driving innovations in member accounts, post-booking management, and rewards.
We also explore her personal passions: balancing family life in Oxford with yoga, pilates, running, and an addiction to Sci-Fi and Fantasy on Audible. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about resilience, adaptability, and leading with purpose in the ever-evolving tech landscape.
SheCanCode is a collaborative community of women in tech working together to tackle the tech gender gap.
Join our community to find a supportive network, opportunities, guidance and jobs, so you can excel in your tech career.
Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in again. I am Kayleigh Bateman, the Managing Director, Community and Partnerships, as she can code, and today we are discussing Jelena's journey into tech leadership, innovation, data and resilience. We're going to dive into the fascinating career of Jelena Riley, technical Manager at Viator, a tech leader who has navigated the dynamic world of software engineering, data systems and public facing platforms, and we're going to chat about resilience, adaptability and leading with purpose in the ever-evolving tech landscape. Jelena, thank you so much for coming on, spilling the Tea and having a chat.
Speaker 2:Hi Kelly, and thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:It's nice to have you on here. Thank you for taking the time out. We'd love to get started with a bit of context about you, if that's OK, and a little bit about who you are, where you come from and how you landed at Viator.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I was born and raised in Serbia. It's a small country in Balkans. Lots of people some people mix it up with Siberia sometimes, which is not slightly different. So I studied numerical and applied mathematics in the University of Belgrade in Serbia, so that was like a maths department.
Speaker 2:I have figured out fairly early in my life that I do want to be a software engineer. I was always curious about things like computers and programming and just really, really curious to find out how things work behind the scenes. So this is the career I kind of chose. In short, if I was just to kind of give a brief kind of overview, um, I got my first job by like knocking at a software company door and asking to volunteer. Wow, that worked. That worked pretty, pretty well, I guess. Uh, for a couple of months I was learning and like then they started paying me and this is how I became a software engineer and I'm really like super grateful for that opportunity. And then from there I found a job. Well, I remained there for like a few years.
Speaker 2:I was very lucky to get visibility of a company based in England. I applied, I was interviewed, I got a job, I moved here and then stayed there for a while. This was like an investment banking company and then, during a set of circumstances, I moved on to a job in TripAdvisor. I actually knew a lady who was my yogaates not pilates, but yoga teacher, and she was working at the time at Holiday Lettings, which is a company owned by TripAdvisor as well as Vital. So Holiday Lettings was all about vacation rentals people from England will know about it, for sure and uh and yeah, I merged like two things I love very much Well, three, if you like like yoga, travel and programming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the styles aligned clearly there for you.
Speaker 2:Totally like you know. Yeah, very much so.
Speaker 1:Our curiosity is well, you said you chose that career path and that you always kind of wanted to do that. Was there someone in your family that was doing that, or someone at school who kind of pushed you in that direction, or was it just you just seen it and thought that's, that's the career for me well, it's funny to say that the answer is really no, like the reason I went for maths is because I always found it kind of.
Speaker 2:It always came easy to me.
Speaker 1:I have to admit.
Speaker 2:So that was one of the things. I didn't really have to learn much at school, it was just kind of really easy. Throughout. Like the high school I had some introduction programming, I think at the time we did like basic I don't know if many people know about that language like it was one of the first kind of procedural computer languages. I didn't really get my own personal computer until I was in my 20s maybe. So I did not. I wasn't one of these kids that kind of grew up coding or gaming or you know doing things like that, but I was just really fascinated and curious about it.
Speaker 2:So even like interesting fact, even when I was, as I was joining university, I did want to go to a department of computer science in a university of maths in Belgrade and I remember this is a very hard university, I have to say like, and for a year they were taking around 400 students and only.
Speaker 2:I think like they were like four departments and they were taking like 100 people per department and I remember I was like 125th on the list and I came to kind of sign in kind of on the very first day. You could do it like over several days, but I sort of rushed and I was like I'm not going to get into a computer science department. So I signed for numerical mathematics and applied mathematics. And that was a big mistake, as I learned later, because most of those very clever mathematical geniuses in the first hundred all went to theoretical mathematics. So I kind of lost a bit there and the part that I found I missed later on is just kind of that basic, that foundation in computer science that would have come missed later on. It's just kind of that basic, that foundation in computer science that would have come in really handy. And that was something that I had to learn on the job later on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I made it sort of a little bit harder for myself there, I would say.
Speaker 2:But I was, I don't know, I don't know what took me there. I just I was just fascinated by the fact that you can sit and write some code and that code does something and produce things and tools and visuals, and you know this whole new world, you know it's a pretty empowering profession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i's bold. So what motivated you to do that and how did that early experience shape your path in software engineering? I take it you don't regret that. You just you know, I'm just going to turn up and I'm going to ask.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I didn't see a different, like I didn't see many options at the time. You know, and it's kind of the same today, like either you have a diploma or you have experience and it's always very hard to get that very first job. And I can't remember exactly how I knew about the company. It was just one of the fairly young companies that was building complete software solutions for retail banking and uh and kind of owning um, basically providing software solutions for lots of banks in the region, so serbia, macedonia and that area. So, um, I I think I emailed them first. I didn't like I didn't quite knock uh to start with, but you know, I thought, you know, if I don't have experience and I don't have, like quite a diploma where they would welcome me with open arms, I have to try something. So I just kind of emailed them and asked would it be OK if I volunteered?
Speaker 2:And this happened, I think, maybe like a couple of days after I graduated. I was like, ok, now it's time to get moving right and I was incredibly lucky that, like the manager who kind of welcomed me to the company and all my colleagues there, it was a really young team, incredibly helpful, incredibly friendly people. A lot of them have become like my really good friends afterwards. Some of them are still kind of, you know, the oldest friends I've got, so everybody was just incredibly happy to help. It was embarrassing in a way how little I knew at the time, you know, and the rate that I was so young and so kind of willing that I was not quite aware of that. And I understand that like, for example, these days, maybe at at this age, I would feel much more self-conscious about it all, but at the time I just really, really wanted to learn and I think that was simply not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and some companies. They just want to grab hold of young people that are willing to learn and they might not necessarily know everything that they need them to know. I think that's a worry sometimes of our community, especially when they're transitioning from one industry into another and they think but I don't know everything, I don't know everything that's expected of me and perhaps a company won't want to take me on. But sometimes if you're just very willing to try and you're bold enough to turn up and if you know they say you don't ask, you don't get, and you turned up and asked for for a role, even to volunteer, that kind of shows initiative and that you want to, that you just really wanted to work in that that industry and a lot of companies they do just grab hold of people like you and think we're going to train them up.
Speaker 2:So honestly, like you know now that I'm kind of managing and mentoring people this is a that and also kind of just talking to family and friends or younger people who are looking to either change the career or or kind of just getting on that career path. Like I keep emphasizing how important enthusiasm is or, you know, pre-interviewing processes, you, it's really really incredibly important just that willingness to learn and ability to learn, and then you're off Like there's nothing you can't do.
Speaker 1:Really, yes, exactly Exactly, especially if you're very young or trying something new. There are many challenges along the way, though, which I wanted to ask you about, because you went from working as a data engineer at Hedge Fund to moving into software engineering at TripAdvisor, so you've made some major transitions along the way. What were the biggest challenges you faced when switching from one industry to another, and also technology stack to another?
Speaker 2:No, absolutely. That was a. That was probably the most difficult time in my career, I have to admit, like uh, because, uh, at the hedge fund I worked in at the beginning I was like working as a data researcher, so so very heavily data focused. And then I moved on to like uh, building software for a trading platform. So I was a while it was kind of actually trading, but most of my work there was technology-wise, windows-based internal customers and not many customers like a very high-risk systems kind of slow release cycle. And then moving to TripAdvisor, it was a complete change. It was like Windows to web, internal customers, to external C-sharp, to Java, microsoft SQL Server, to MySQL, then Postgres and now like DynamoDB and whatnot. So it was a massive, massive change.
Speaker 2:And I have to say it came at a time in my life where I was having like two tiny children at home. You can never sleep enough when you're in that state and I think I've never in my life had like such a bad, imposter syndrome as at that time, because I was just constantly knackered in the beginning I just felt, I just realized I was constantly aware of how much I don't know, you know, and this was like almost starting all over again, right? Uh, just just in a different set of circumstances, I was talking about how earlier I was, uh, super eager and young and I was so full of confidence and everything, and here I was like super exhausted, exhausted, really willing to become a part of this wonderful company and again I was incredibly lucky. I think throughout my career that I've always worked with incredibly supportive people and, uh and uh, my colleagues in TripAdvisor at the time were just amazing, like you know, again very forgiving of all the things that I didn't know, like I don't know. It was incredibly hard, but again, I had people to thank too and you know, just kind of being, I think, also coming from the perspective of kind of knowledge is power, and I always wanted to. You know, curious as I am, I always thought that you have to have a lot of knowledge in order to start using the tool, applying that knowledge and and producing something.
Speaker 2:So accepting that you don't know everything and that you can't know everything is, you know, if knowledge is power, accepting this is wisdom, because you just can't, you can't possibly know everything. I mean, especially now, like I'm going to jump back, like to present moment, where I'm like a in technical management and you just have to delegate and rely on people. So much you. You're just not in control so much anymore. Right you? You have to have like trust and and uh, and trust others to deliver and to know about things you don't know about. But at the time it was like it was really hard, like taking it one step at a time. Yeah, everything comes. I think I think we just you know, it's in human nature to be afraid of things that we don't know. But, as many different philosophies and wisdom say, like you know, know, do a little every day, and then you get there, right?
Speaker 1:yes, I you know, I can't tell you how many of our community members have said something similar about leadership and the and we say on here often when you step into leadership, you think everybody is looking to you like you know everything and you should know everything. And actually usually what your bosses are looking for is for you to delegate and to trust, as you just said, those people on your team that you don't know everything. So you're going to delegate to the people that are, you know, experienced and know exactly what you're asking them to do. And you, you have to trust that it's going to happen and it's.
Speaker 1:It's a quite an unnerving time when that happens at first, where you're kind of thinking, oh gosh, I have to relinquish control of everything because I don't know everything and I can't do everything, um, and it's a it. It can feel like quite a challenge, but building that team around you, a team that you can trust, um, is really important. And also when you go through those challenges yourself and you might find yourself at a company where you you're in that phase, in that life chapter that you were going through, and you're thinking oh gosh, I just really need some sleep and I need some support and I'm trying to learn.
Speaker 1:Sometimes landing at the right company can make such a difference because if you hadn't have landed a TripAdvisor and felt supported at that time, you probably then would have had to have found the time to jump ship and go elsewhere and having young children that you really didn't need that at your point with young children at home. So sometimes landing in the right company can make such a difference to the rest of your career and can really help you. But you've been there a decade so they did something right. So you've been with TripAdvisor now nearly a decade and how has the technology landscape at the company evolved over the years and what projects have you found most exciting or rewarding? You must have seen quite a change.
Speaker 2:There definitely has been lots of changes. I mean, tripadvisor is a big company and it's basically composed of its like subsidiaries, and Holy Delettings that I joined initially was one of them, and Viator, which I moved to a couple of years later, and incredibly strong experience this business and I've worked on like when I moved to Viator, I moved first to the supply side of things. This is like operators facing business. We were rebuilding like a new platform which was really exciting, platform which was really exciting Now. Then, later on, I moved to like a traveler facing platform where we have like millions of customers visiting our site, using our apps every day. Like a complex system supporting all that, lots of microservices, etc. And I remember like it's really fun because I've been around for quite a long time like almost over nine years now.
Speaker 2:I've seen lots of changes. Like every move through the company was almost like starting a new job, sometimes because different domains, sometimes different technologies, et cetera. And the way the technology progressed from that time I joined until now is pretty amazing. I remember initially we had all of our servers on-premise where we had to look after them within the company. Like you have to have everything sorted, you have to think about scaling. Think about, like, disaster recovery, think about all sorts of things that cloud today just does for you. So you know that was like. That was a massive, massive move. So you know that was a massive, massive move. Then these days we use like. Instead of having kind of monolithic solutions and waterfall development, we have completely moved to Agile, to Kubernetes and AWS, like, where just the maintenance of our systems has become so much easier, delegated to AWS. You can scale really easily.
Speaker 2:We moved from scheduled releases, which were maybe a few times a week, which was still going even further back, thinking about how it worked in the investment banking, where you have to really really thoroughly test everything and release once in a couple of months, for example. Like you know, moving on to like several times a week was pretty amazing. And then going even further, like moving to CICD pipelines, where all of our services now release instantly. So every time you make a change you trigger a pipeline. You see it straightaway in production, which is incredibly rewarding, and I think this is simply a modern way of developing and it has become a new norm. But thinking about this even 10 years ago was a dreamlike.
Speaker 2:Then we went from front-end, then we went from like from front-end technologies. We went from using backbone and dust templates to very modern frameworks such as React with TypeScript. We went from using Selenium for testing. We're using Playwright, I mean, you know, I think we simply keep an eye out on like what not necessarily the newest, but newest and well proven and tested and and uh and stable technologies are, and this is what what we try to follow it's quite a shifting mindset as well to to to lead a team through changes like that as well, because I wanted to ask you about your approach to leadership and team development.
Speaker 1:And then you know your philosophy for managing a team of engineers, how you ensure they stay motivated and innovative at the same time. But some of those shifts in technology you just mentioned there, I remember when, when those type of things happen, there's always there can sometimes in the industry, be like a panic of when you said everything was on premise and then we went to the cloud. I remember when that was happening and a lot of people that worked in tech were like, well, what am I going to look after? There's nothing on premise. What am I supposed to look after? Like how, how do you manage that as a leader and kind of keep everybody motivated when big changes like that are happening and and you can look to the future and how much you know more productive people are going to be. But so you're always going to get that that feeling as well of there's too much change. You know, perhaps I'm not enjoying that as a team.
Speaker 1:How do you manage all of that?
Speaker 2:When it comes to changes. I think we're kind of lucky that almost everyone loves learning about new technologies and loves jumping on the ship. And I know when we introduced AWS initially I was asking the team so who wants to do the course? And everybody wants to do the course. So in that sense I've never seen any problems with kind of introducing any new stacks to the team. They were always like really curious and really willing to embrace.
Speaker 1:Part of your culture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but sometimes there are different types of changes organizational, whatever where people really, you know, most people don't like changes to start with and it's always like difficult to drive to the change. But I always try to frame things in a positive way, like both for myself and for the team, and try to kind of pass that on to the team. When it comes to leadership style, it's always like it's always with empathy, it's always kind of acknowledging hey guys, I know that this change is not. You know, there's a change coming, so so why is it good? I always think that it's really good for people to understand what are the benefits of it. So not like, hey, now we're doing it this way, without explanation, it's not going to get people on board, but if somebody's on board then it's so much easier to kind of see that change through.
Speaker 2:And I think also it really depends. You know, sometimes you have to kind of go. I think we always need to just be aware and this is my kind of leadership style, if you like of individuality and differences between us. Like we are all like different people. We have like work life, we have home life, we might be somebody else at home, which hopefully we're not Like you know, hopefully we can bring ourselves to work fully and this is what I'm trying to encourage always, like so, if people do have concerns and worries, I really very much like to talk about everything openly, sometimes like even maybe exposing yourself and being showing that you're vulnerable too, like that you have concerns and things, and just building that relationship of trust and I think that has worked so far really well yeah, yeah, and you mentioned home life there as well.
Speaker 1:People do have home lives and that can be tough to balance as well with work sometimes. But what about yourself? You know, balancing demanding career and family, that can be really tough. So how do you manage your time? You, you know, being a tech leader and mother um, someone who said, you know, enjoys yoga and running. Do you have more hours in your day than I have in mine?
Speaker 2:no, I, I know I totally understand. Um, to be fair, like, I think I think that Viator has been incredible when it comes to supporting like a work-life balance and even when I, when I do like people, when I interview people, like I often point this out like not only I've been here almost nine years we really have like a very low turnover of people and and this is why I'm still here, I guess. So we do have things like remote first and flexible working hours. So if I need to take two hours out of my day and take it to the dentist, I can do that. I can make up my hours whenever I can. There's lots of understanding around that.
Speaker 2:Then there are things like benefits for lifestyle, lifestyle and and gym memberships and, and you know all sorts of things like it's not easy to find a place like that and, um, you know, even like things like uh being able to use uh I don't know private health insurance and uh, I can, I can talk to a gp in 20 minutes if I needed to, which saves me incredible hustle of like trying to book uh, to get my kids to, to talk to someone, etc. It's almost impossible these days on NHS.
Speaker 1:I definitely like feel like privileged, like maybe you know almost too, almost embarrassingly privileged sometimes yeah, another great, actual, useful benefit of of a company things that really do help you um, and so, as you mentioned, you've been um a vital uh and supervisor for for nine years now. I wanted to ask you a little bit as well about, with your experience across different sectors and roles, what do you see as the next big trends in tech and what will shape the future of software engineering and data systems? Do you, do you have any personal goals for the next few years?
Speaker 2:yeah, so, um, I think there are a couple of things, uh, when it comes to technology, that that we are looking into, as well as many other companies out there, and, uh so, the trends being building very reliable and extensive customer data platforms, which means, like, we do work with lots and lots of external customers and understanding, you know, not treating them all the same makes sense, because they might have different needs, different hobbies, they're looking for different things from our platform. So, investing in that kind of customer data platform, gathering knowledge about customers and providing them like a personalized experience, I think this is something that lots of companies out there are doing, and so are we, and this is just a trend that is present in all the customer facing, uh, businesses. But, and then the other thing is obviously the one that everybody is buzzing about, which is ai right or and no, I don't think that it's going to take over our lives or our jobs, like it was on my lips to say.
Speaker 1:I was like what do you think?
Speaker 2:I, I genuinely don't think so. Like, if you look back, like you know we don't like use horses to pull carts anymore. We have, like electric vehicles that do the job for us. You know there's so much heavy pulling that has been done today by automations and automated processes. And you know, when people say like, oh, I'm not going to have a job'm thinking, well, maybe I'll have a three day, three days a week job and the rest is going to be done by some machines, and you know we'll enjoy benefits of that, etc. So so you know, I do believe this is only a start and we already see, like so many applications of like generative ai.
Speaker 1:I think it's just, it's only going to get better yeah, definitely, and, like we said earlier, it's one of those. You know, things change, don't? People don't always like change, but it's more seeing how it improves your time, it frees up your time to do other things and to use your your time in a much better way than you might have been, and going on to do other things that you never got the time to do. Um, and and as a leader, it's now you framing that as well.
Speaker 2:What a lovely new challenge to to throw into the mix uh, in in, um, your job and everything else that you do mind-provoking, definitely, but on the personal goals kind of level, um, we did have a little chat about this before, but I would kind of I feel like I've been incredibly lucky throughout my career and I was kind of you kind of made me look back with this podcast and and I keep like making coming after the same conclusion and I would really love to give back if I can and where I can and just get more involved and uh, especially, like you know, we all know that women in tech is like a, is a is a big problem and every company wants to do something about it and shift the balance and things like that. And going back to like from university days when we had uh, I know that people are surprised when I say that at maths university, majority of of students were girls, like a large majority, and most of them went, as I said before, to like theoretical maths and then ended up in like academy or teaching and things like that. Um, but we had something, uh, we run a couple of years ago and I think I'm sure we're going to run it again. We run like a rotational program which was basically we kind of advertised four job positions for people who don't have previous commercial experience in programming. They don't have computer science related diploma, but they have done a little bit of poking and coding themselves. So all they've got is like love for programming. They could come from any career, any kind of background, or any uni or no uni whatever.
Speaker 2:So all we asked for it was enthusiasm for programming. We have found four amazing candidates one girl sadly dropped out because she was gonna move from the us, or she she didn't in the end. But we, uh we had three lovely people coming from different backgrounds, uh, for a year incorporated in our teams, uh, and they, I have to say, after that one year, they are all fully employed now, uh, yeah, they're, they've been with us and one of them is on my team and I'm I'm so happy and proud that we've done that. I really want us to to have a repeat of that. It's kind of like an obvious proof that you don't have to come from like computer science background. You just need the will and a bit of skill to start yeah.
Speaker 1:There are so many ladies in our community that are thinking that they have to be a certain way, have to have a certain background, have to be a computer science degree, and you know, if I haven't done that early in life, then I've kind of missed the boat and I can't try something new early in life, then I've kind of missed the boat and I can't try something new.
Speaker 1:Um, and actually all it takes sometimes is just sometimes just rocking up to that software company's door and knocking on it and saying, hey, could you take me in? I want to try something new. And um, like you said there, you know you found some brilliant people who just have that enthusiasm that you know money can't buy um for them to, to learn and and to grow with the company. And now that's it's retaining them and and as well, now they're in it's making sure that they're inside a culture where people stay, which you have already said. You know a lot of people just stay in and might move around, um a vital and and trip advisor, but um, it's making sure that that's built into the culture as well. So people stick around. Once you've invested in them at the start, they stick around as well.
Speaker 2:It's a win-win from both sides because you get people from different backgrounds. They already have some experience in life, so that was another prerequisite, I guess, just so that they have done, they have worked in job somewhere. So bringing that kind of different view, uh, on things, that just kind of new ideas, new opportunities, different frame how we look at, how we look at problems, how we look at solving them, uh I think that's like priceless. That makes sense definitely.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, no, we were already out of time. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything about your day-to-day and your career so far. So thank you so much for coming on and having a chat with us. Thank you so much for having me. And for everybody listening, as always. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you again next time.
