Valentin Prugnaud, AI product engineer · TypeScript

My first real job as an engineer was building marketing websites and newsletters at Backflip in Paris. Within a year I was the only engineer on a B2B ecommerce system a manufacturing company ran on: UI, backend, and the ops when checkout or inventory broke. The problems rarely arrived fully specified, and there was no one to hand them to. I found out I liked that. Owning the product end to end while the problem is still fuzzy became the thing I looked for in everything after.

It's why I built Liftmap at WiderFunnel, a CRO SaaS, when implementation alone stopped being enough. It's why I said yes to being CTO of Speakbox (Techstars W21) while working on TELUS's API team, two customer-facing apps and every architecture decision behind them. And it's why I ended up in developer experience at TELUS: the fuzziest problems weren't in the product anymore, they were in how engineers shipped it. Four years there. A self-service deploy experience on Cloud Run took time-to-production from weeks to under a day. GitHub Actions workflows spread to 50+ teams. An AI-assisted incident workflow produced 500+ reports in its first two weeks. Different products, same job: find the fuzzy problem, own it until it isn't.

The work I look for now has the same shape. A useful product has to fit the people operating it, the systems it depends on, and the cost of changing it later. I am most effective when I can move between those constraints: talk to users, narrow the product, write the code, inspect production, and leave the team with a delivery path they can keep using.