This female CTO got into tech because she wanted her career to be collaborative

After being promoted to CTO last summer, Audrey Troutt is taking her leadership role pretty seriously.

At real estate fintech company Tomo, the 41-year-old West Philly-based technologist was previously VP of Engineering, where she was in charge of the engineering team and product technology. Now that she’s CTO, her work responsibilities are broader and she gets to engage with teams company-wide. Beyond that, she also recognizes there aren’t a lot of female CTOs, and feels responsibility as a role model.

Troutt’s path to the C-suite wasn’t always clear. She went to school for music and physics before deciding to complete a post-grad program at the University of Pennsylvania for computer science. She bounced from consulting to startups to Comcast before landing at Connecticut-based Tomo. The whole time she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a manager.

Now that she’s in a leadership role, Troutt, who was named as a 2022 RealLIST Engineers honoree, wants to support others in the tech community and help them be their best.

In this edition of Technical.ly’s How I Got Here series, Troutt reflects on her career path and her drive to assist younger technologists. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you go to school for something related to tech?

I didn’t know I wanted to do software development until later in life. When I was an undergrad. I majored in music and physics, which is a weird combination. I really couldn’t decide, I thought I wanted a music degree. I did music composition. I studied music history. I wrote chamber music that was published with the Florida West Coast Symphony [now the Sarasota Orchestra], which is super cool, but I also loved math — and I got into physics because physics is just like math brought to life.

I had this incredible double life where I was between the humanities and creative work. And the sciences, which are, of course, rigorous and structured.

There’s interesting overlaps. There’s problem solving, in common between the two, really — creativity is required in both domains. And I enjoyed that. It’s part of my brain that loves puzzles, and solving problems and structure and logic, and there’s a part of my brain that loves creativity. But what was missing from both of these was collaboration. Both composition and scientific research can be really isolating and I found myself as I was getting toward graduation feeling like I don’t want to do either of these when I grow up.

Do you still play music?

I do. I mean, my husband stuck with it. He’s actually a musicologist and a musician and a performer and composer, so our house is full of instruments for both of us. You know, playing the piano — or we just got a gong for ourselves for Christmas. And we make fun music videos for our family to celebrate the holidays and things like that. Music is a big part of our lives. Even if I’m not an active composer or, certainly, a public performer, I still love it.

How did you get into tech?

The spark that got me into software development was actually the software I was using to write music, software called Finale. There’s a lot of things like this out there today — it’s like a word processor for music.

It occurred to me one day that somebody made that software and the decisions they made about what kind of things were easy to do, or what kind of things were hard to do with that software was actually having an impact on me as a composer. I got inspired to figure out, ‘Who are these people? How do they make this?’ I wanted to be one of those people that makes the tools, not just use tools that other people have made. And so I started getting really curious about software development.

I went to the MCIT program at UPenn. I started my career right out of that, got hired for a small company here in Philadelphia, a consulting company, and it launched everything that came from then. I’ve just been moving from startup to startup — with one big exception when I went to Comcast — but bouncing around here in Philadelphia and working remotely for a company across the country.

What is one of your proudest moments in your career?

Building Tomo, building this team, building this technology platform. Building this product has required everything I have, everything I’ve ever learned. All of my experience, all of my hard work, the hard work of not just me, but this whole team.

Because it’s not just we’ve been able to build these sites and build these services which are great and we are helping homebuyers, which is something that’s really near and dear to my heart. We’re pushing this industry forward in terms of what’s possible and empowering homebuyers and providing them with information. Like that’s really important.

But I’m also proud of how we’ve done it. I’m proud of the team that we built, I’m proud of how we work together, I’m proud of how we learn together. We have learned from every failure and moved ourselves forward.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career?

Early in my career, it was figuring out, what do you want to do? There are infinite choices available to you when you’re in tech, when you’re in software engineering, and there’s the whole like, ‘Do I want to be a manager or do I want to stay as an engineer?’ I wrestled with this decision for years, and I bounced back and forth because I didn’t really know. To a certain extent, you can’t know until you try.

I’ve fully embraced this as my calling because I do find it really powerful. What I can accomplish as one engineer is nothing compared to what this incredible team, when set up for success, is going to be able to accomplish. I drive a lot of satisfaction from making that possible and providing them also a great environment where they love their jobs.

Where do you see your career going?

My dream is always to come back to helping make a career in technology available to more people.

This idea of sharing knowledge, of teaching and creating pathways for folks. It’s not just about, you know, your first coding bootcamp. That’s not what it takes to create a successful career in technology. It’s about that scaffolding.

I learned, over the course of my career, a lot about how that can happen and how you can scale that in an organization. And I don’t know [exactly] how I want to bring that back to the community. Being active in the community and my network, and friends and contacts and acquaintances and things like that. Helping, wherever I can, more folks grow in their careers in software engineering.

What advice would you give to a younger engineer?

I want to go back to this message about how powerful sharing your learnings can be. And the double-sided benefit of sharing what you’re learning with your community.

You never know the conversations that you’re going to start. For me, this has been such a tremendous fuel for my career. I’ve built this network and the reputation that I do have, and I learned so much from both listening to and learning from other folks, as well as sharing what I’ve learned and getting questions back, getting feedback — and then building upon that.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.