Pilar founded a national advertising and public relations firm with a focus on multicultural communications, which she sold to a larger agency after leading the company for 14 years. She is the former CEO of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, where she helped the organization grow and expand, attracting new funding and building out new programs and initiatives designed to attract Hispanic and Latinx professionals into the STEM fields. She served as a Vice President with the San Diego Foundation, where she helped raise individual donations to create eight community foundations. Prior to founding a nationally acclaimed Hispanic advertising firm, she worked in television broadcasting and hosted a national Spanish language issues-oriented radio program. Pilar has been honored as the Top 100 Women in STEM by US News and World Reports, as Inspirational Leader of the Year by San Diego Magazine, with a California Assembly Resolution for efforts with Latino youth, an American Cancer Society volunteer award, the Child Abuse Prevention Council Volunteer of the Year Recognition, and was featured as a Woman in Leadership publication two years in a row.