Life at WeBuild-AI: Meet Kaitlin Brabec, who shares her non-traditional journey into tech via marketing analytics and Python

People & Culture

10 Apr

What's your role here at WeBuild-AI?

I'm a Senior AI Engineer, focused on designing and building complex generative AI and agentic solutions for some of the biggest enterprise players in the energy and utilities sectors. That means working closely with clients to understand their real-world challenges and then architecting AI-powered systems that actually move the needle - not just proof-of-concepts, but production-grade solutions built to scale.

What does a typical day look like for you?

It usually kicks off with our morning stand-up, where the team aligns on priorities, flags any blockers and figures out who needs support from whom. After that, I'm fairly intentional about how I structure my time - I work in focused blocks so I can go deep on technical problems without constant context-switching. When I hit a wall (which is part of the job!), I know when to step back and lean on the people around me for a fresh perspective.

One thing that's kept things interesting lately is that I'm currently building out a CRM from scratch. It's not traditionally in my wheelhouse, but that's exactly what makes it exciting - it's pushed me into new territory and genuinely broadened how I think about software development beyond my AI background.

What's your career journey been like so far?

My path into tech was anything but linear - but looking back, every step makes sense.

I graduated with a Bachelor's in Marketing, with minors in Psychology and Management. I spent a few years in marketing roles, but over time I started to feel like I needed to go deeper, not just broader. When I reflected on what genuinely excited me about marketing, it kept coming back to the analytics side - making sense of data, spotting patterns, understanding behaviour.

So I started teaching myself Python in my spare time, quietly building something new alongside my day job. That momentum eventually led me to a women in tech career changers programme, which opened the door into the world of software and AI. From there, I've spent the last four years building AI solutions, growing fast, and learning something new on almost every project.

It's been one of the best decisions I've ever made.

What do you enjoy the most about your job here?

Honestly, two things stand out.

The first is the people. I'm surrounded by some genuinely brilliant, deeply technical minds - and as someone who came into this field through a non-traditional route, that was one of the things I was actively looking for when I was going through the interview process. Being in that kind of environment pushes me to keep growing every single day.

The second is the culture. For all the technical rigour, it's also just a really warm place to work. The teams are close - we go on walks together, eat lunch together and genuinely look out for each other. I never feel like I have to have all the answers on my own, whether I need to talk through a technical problem or just have a chat. That kind of psychological safety matters more than people realise.

What’s a piece of work you'd be proud to show your past self?

For the CRM project I mentioned, I had to build a data migration system entirely from scratch - in Python, against a MongoDB database, for a data model we were designing ourselves in real time.

The challenge was bigger than it sounds. After doing my research, I found there were no well-maintained Python packages for handling data migrations in MongoDB. So I had to design and build the whole thing myself, including making it idempotent - meaning it could be safely re-run without corrupting or duplicating data, even when the source data wasn't neatly pre-packaged and waiting for me.

Coming from a data science and AI background, I'd never had to think deeply about migration architecture before. My world had always been about working with data that already existed. Having to think about how to move, structure and safely transform data that was being defined as we went - that was a real stretch, and exactly the kind of challenge that makes you better. I'm proud of it.