A Day in the Life: AI Engineer at V7 Labs

You went from building your own startup to joining V7 as an AI Engineer. That's a big shift! What made you take the leap?

The short answer is, they actually have a product that is well designed. I looked at their product, and it looked like a good product. I like to work on good products.

The second thing was Simon, our CTO. I really like him. In the interview, I noticed—oh, this is a smart guy, and he's into it. He's not just all strategy, he's still in the weeds, you know? That spoke to me.

What's been the biggest adjustment going from founder mode, where you made every decision, to being part of a larger team?

What's great about V7 is that they still give you a lot of autonomy and trust you to make features from the get-go. My first project was to take our slides feature and fully rebuild it. That went very well.

The trust they give you from the start means you won't feel micromanaged. If you have sensible design choices or if you're sensible about "hey, this seems like a good lever, let's pull this lever," they're not going to tell you "oh no, let's not do that."

From that aspect, it's not that different. For me, the biggest change is just that you're working in a larger team, which has its pros and cons. We have very senior engineers on the team, so you get to learn from them.

But you also have to get used to things. In my previous startup, we were a bit more YOLO about "Let's just ship, and if breaks fix it" Here we have more process. I had to get used to things like stricter testing and Rev Up, splitting your commits into smaller commits with a specific review flow, waiting for reviews sometimes, and not just merging it yourself. These are things that just need a bit of adjustment.

What's something you really appreciate about working at V7 that you didn't have as a solo founder?

Customer feedback. We have users who actually care about the platform, both internally and externally. I’ve actually joined customer calls with real customers who are non-technical, and it's interesting to see their minds work.

We also have SEs (solutions engineers) in the room. They're technical and smart. They're scrappy. They'll write their own Python scripts to do whatever they can on the platform. They're your best power user customers, and you have them in the room, and you can just chat with them.

I'll give a concrete example. Just yesterday, I spoke with Brian, a Solution Engineer here, about a feature we're building called Agent Builder. This will allow you to just speak and it will create a full agent for you with multiple properties. He showed me that he had 'built an agent to build an agent' based on an output document. It will parse the sections of the output document, and for each section, it builds a property.

This was super insightful because a power user already used it this way, and I could integrate this into the flow. I could ask fewer follow-up questions and find a better overall flow for the user. That was amazing.

Can you walk us through what a typical day looks like for you?

First there is pure feature development. Building a new feature from scratch. I use Cursor extensively for this. We can actually ship fast, which is nice. You build the feature, make tests for it, make the lints pass, connect it correctly through Elixir, make a front end for it, all that stuff.

Second, there are blue sky projects that are very R&D-like. You can do whatever you want. For example, I did a DSPy optimisation. DSPy is a framework that allows you to let AI with LLMs judge and improve the prompt by itself.

I exported a bunch of customer agents and tried to recreate them with a feature I was building called Auto Property, which writes a property from a description. I basically had a benchmark where I was creating descriptions of real properties in real projects and trying to recreate them, seeing if the AI built a better prompt than the human. The score went up, and then I copied over the improved prompt and put it into our production environment. 

Third is organising your PRs, Rev Up, and housekeeping stuff. Fixing bugs and issues. I think that's part of every job.

Oh, and also very few meetings, which is nice. Overall, I really enjoy it. Every day I'm excited to code, which is cool.

You mentioned V7 is growing fast. What's that been like to be part of?

We're on track to grow 8x this year, which is cool. If you want to be part of a startup that has PMF, it's the right place. And if you want to build a startup later, they're fine with that ambition too.

What traits or qualities have you noticed in your colleagues at V7 that make the team work well together?

I think we have very different breeds of engineers, actually, because the platform team is very different from the front-end team, which is different from the back-end team.

The front-end team are great at design. They're cool, I love working them. With the back-end team, it's about doing things right, putting things in the right place, and thinking very deeply. They're very senior devs writing in Elixir mostly. It's a more technical language that attracts a certain kind of engineer. There's a real sense of craft and a real sense of "this was not part of my ticket, but I still did it because it made sense."

There's a lot of autonomy in both teams. I think there's as much autonomy as you want. We have two PMs who are cool, and they give you freedom. They can make very specific tickets, but for me, coming from a founder background, I write my tickets a bit more as I go, and that's fine. That suits me quite well.

For the AI engineering team, one thing I want to emphasise is that we have Dodo in the office (which has 4x4900 GPUs, 96 GB of RAM). We can just connect to it so easily. You can train stuff on the weekend, on weekdays. I’m training a tiny recursive model, and our CTO Simon is training a midi model. If you join, please be nerdy and do stuff like this.

We ship a smaller part of the product because we're part of the Python codebase, which is smaller and more nimble. All of our code is very separated because it's individual tools, which means we have very few interdependencies. We use Ruff, and UV, which is beautiful. We get to move quickly.

Right now, it's a very small team, just me and Joe, who joined very recently. We're ramping up; we want new super cracked engineers.

What's your favourite think about being in the office?

Our CTO is always in the office. A bunch of engineers are always in the office. That creates a real sense of camaraderie. I'm not as familiar with Elixir, so I can ask stupid questions about Elixir, and that's great.

Also, this is small, but they pay for your lunch. It just makes you feel valued, you know? Everyone eats together. I think I'm eating better now than I ever have in my career.

What's a recent win, either something you shipped or a problem you solved that made you feel like "yes, this is why I'm here"?

I'll give you a few to choose from.

One was when one of the Solutions Engineers just told me, "Hey, by the way, can we have the ability to bold text in slides?" And I just did it. It was quick, and it works.

Another recent win is that now, finally, Auto Properties get merged, which has been a bit in the making. It's been my second major feature, so I'm very happy about that.

And third is Property Composer, which a bigger project I just got started on it a few days ago and the progress I've made on it is very fast and very fun. I'm happy about that.

Last question: as someone who's seen both sides – building solo and building as part of a team – what would you say to other early-career engineers trying to figure out their path?

I think if you want to build a startup later, it's valuable to be part of something that has real product-market fit. You learn what works. You see the craft, the processes, and how senior engineers think. But you also need a place that gives you autonomy to keep that founder mindset alive.

V7 does both. You get to learn from really senior people, but you're also trusted to make real decisions and ship real features. You're not just a cog. And that's rare.

Want to join Antoine and the team? V7 is hiring for people who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty, love solving problems, and want to help build the future of AI.