The Arriva Story

While the transition to remote work happened swiftly, the compensation framework for talent living abroad and working remotely for US companies has not kept pace. Arriva is here to close this gap.

Considerations are many when evaluating compensation by location. Developing an equitable compensation strategy for Latin American talent is Arriva’s mission and we are starting with technology professionals. We are committed to giving technologists in the region the power to control their financial futures, maximize their incomes, and hone the soft skills needed to land their dream jobs today and in the future.

Highlighting the interest in LATAM and underscoring the importance of pay equity, CEO, Leslie Pesante, shares her reasons for founding and building Arriva.

Growing up in a working-poor neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY and spending her summers with her grandparents in the rural mountain village of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, Leslie learned at an early age that hard work put food on the table, but rarely changed broader life circumstances.

Leslie’s grandfather, Emilio, spent his life as an agricultural worker, toiling in Puerto Rico’s sugarcane fields until the industry collapsed after WWII. With few local alternatives Emilio took a course in agriculture at the local community college and, like many men of his era, became a seasonal contract laborer in the United States. As a young girl, Leslie remembers her grandfather telling her stories of working from dawn to dusk as a contractor and flying back and forth from Puerto Rico to the US for months at a time. Emilio’s wages were minimal, and his benefits nonexistent, so Leslie’s grandmother, Aurea, took a job as a cook at the local school to support their five children.

There are many hardworking people like Leslie’s grandparents who have paved the way for future generations. Unfortunately, most arrived with big dreams that typically ended in nightmares. Today, the manual labor jobs of Emilio and Aurea’s era have largely been replaced with technology positions, such as engineers, product managers, and designers working in far-off lands for leading US firms. Sadly, two generations later outcomes are not all that different. Tech workers may be paid a bit better than laborers, and no longer have to work under the burning sun, but there is still little or no opportunity to build the generational wealth that these technology positions could offer. Leslie launched Arriva to change these outcomes,

In today's global employment market, how skills and experience are valued is influenced by a variety of evolving factors which are often opaque to workers. Against this backdrop, it’s tempting for people to use a search engine, read a report, or take other generic approaches to gauge compensation levels. Unfortunately these approaches are riddled with out of date, unreliable data, and rarely account for how an individual’s actual experience, titles, salaries, and other factors are adapted across industries, companies, and geographies. Arriva uses hundreds of thousands of data points to take these variables into account. Click here to get your copy of the average salaries across various tech roles in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay. And when you are ready to see how your individual experience stacks up, join Arriva and get your Custom Compensation Score.

“Arribar” means “to arrive” in Spanish, and “va” means “to go” in several languages. Together, Arriva represents not just arriving at a place, but going somewhere that can change the trajectory of your life. Ready to go the distance? Join us!