The 7bridges blog

A week at 7bridges from Alexandre

Written by Alexandre Berard | 1:00 PM on June 20, 2022

Alexandre joined the 7bridges team for a week this month, expanding his knowledge of working environments and helping him see the possibilities of his studies. Here's what he had to say about his time at 7bridges:

7bridges is a company full of wonders that has given me a much clearer understanding of a working environment. 

When I arrived in front of the 7bridges building with as much knowledge about how a company works as a bag of pebbles would. This was my first internship. I had no idea what an office would be like and, honestly, expected it to be full of people with neat suits and piercing eyes. 

Instead, I was welcomed by the co-founder and CEO, Philip Ashton, and many other wonderful people. All ushering me into a very warm and sociable building. The furniture and the decoration were simple, yet enjoyable, and gave a comfortable feeling to the place. It was as if I was invited to someone’s house for the first time. 

The atmosphere was pleasant and my first day on the job was spent shadowing meetings with Matei Beremski, the co-founder and CPO (Chief Product Officer). From those meetings, I got a general understanding of how the company operates and what it created. I found myself impatient for the next four days when I’d get to shadow the Heads of four departments: Customer Success (Simon Lewis), Product (Aurelio Sanchiz Callejón), Design (Stuart Eggleston) and  Principal Engineer, Ben Ede

Each department contributes to 7bridges in such a way that they all work together, therefore aren’t isolated from one another. As each Head of Department explained their job and gave me a rundown of a day in their life, it became clear to me that unity in a company is what allows it to grow, prosper and profit greatly. 

7bridges is a high-growth scale-up using AI to do really interesting work. It’s attracting increasing amounts of clients and profiting greatly. After this week of shadowing meetings and asking numerous questions, I feel like I have had a complete and very enjoyable experience with 7bridges. And now I have a broad idea of how businesses work!

From frontend engineering to data management optimisation, I grasped the basic aspects of what a day in the life of any role in 7bridges is like. I also feel like I have a much better understanding of what I might want to do in the future as some jobs have spiked my interest. 

My time with QA and front-end engineering were probably the moments where I had the most fun because of the coding we experimented with in front-end (we messed around with code and the outcomes were rather ridiculous sometimes). And with QA, it was pretty much just poking at code and seeing where and when it would break. The havoc that QA described doing to the code that front-end produced was especially appealing. 

The job that appealed to me the most was definitely front-end coding. It’s where we transform what the design team creates into an interactive platform that clients can use. I’m probably influenced by the code platform projects I do at school, but I think it would be a genuinely fulfilling and fun job to do! 

Thank you 7bridges for giving me the opportunity to have such an amazing internship with you, I wish you all the best!