I learned I was pregnant a week after signing on to an AI startup. I shipped up until I gave birth — here's how I managed.

• Replit product engineer Rachael Fuller signed her contract one week before she learned she was pregnant.
• Fuller said she worked until midnight in her third trimester and shipped product until the day she gave birth.
• Parents "bring a kind of time management that you don't develop until you have kids," she told Business Insider.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rachael Fuller, a 31-year-old product engineer at Replit, who lives in San Francisco. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I'm married to my high school sweetheart. We met in standardized testing when we were 12.

We got married during the pandemic, and our wedding got postponed. By the time we finally had it, I was pregnant with our first. We have two daughters: one who's about to turn 3, and our latest addition, who's 2 and a half months.

I found out I was pregnant with my first when I was winding down my first company. I honestly was like, "I should just get a job in Big Tech, get the cushy maternity benefits." That would be the rational thing to do.

But I never felt that excited about being a small cog in a very large machine. I decided to take the leap and work on this new startup while also having my first baby, which I don't know that I would recommend.

It was a journey. We moved back to our home in Massachusetts to be near our family at this time, to have that extra support. I was building these two really big projects: a life inside me, and also a company.

Disclaimer: I have pretty easy pregnancies. I don't get nausea, I sleep pretty well. My husband is also a stay-at-home dad, so that simplifies our life immensely. If it weren't for his sacrifices and picking up the slack, I wouldn't have survived, let alone launch anything. I'm really grateful that he's made that sacrifice.

Still, something's gotta give. I was really into cooking or hosting dinner parties, and that's what I chose to sacrifice.

You need to be really careful about where you choose to work. Even putting aside the crazy 996 culture, there are a lot of tech companies that are led by people who don't have kids, who don't understand what it takes to raise a family.

I started at Beacons, a small company founded by four single men who are wonderful and wanted to be supportive of me as a mom. I was pumping, and we had to work out where I would do that in this tiny, three-room office. We figured it out.

I joined Replit in April. I signed my offer letter, and then found out the next week that I was pregnant with my second.

A big reason I joined Replit is that there are a lot of families there. When I was doing my last interview with Replit's cofounders, Amjad and Haya, they had their daughter sitting on their lap, chatting with me.

There have been a few times when I'll come into the office and people's kids will be in for the day. It's not a problem. It's actually kind of cool: my coworker's kid is showing me the app they're building on Replit.

When you have that many parents, the company is able to be pro-family in a way that's natural and not forced. It felt like a very supportive environment for me.

I knew this job was going to be a lot more demanding because of where Replit was in its growth curve. I wanted to experience this feeling of hypergrowth.

I worked on an initiative to connect Replit's agent with third-party applications. It's called Connectors. We actually ended up acquiring a company, OpenInt, to make it happen, and I shepherded that acquisition.

We had to ship it before I gave birth. In tech, you don't often have really hard deadlines like that.

It was intense. In the weeks leading up to the big launches, we have sprint weeks where we're all together in-person, coding for 12 hours a day. I worked at the office till midnight, Ubered home, and worked a little bit before I went to sleep.

I was in my third trimester. It was crazy.

The day the Connectors feature launched, I went straight from the office to the hospital. I was having contractions. How crazy would that be, to literally launch both on the same day?

We shipped the feature at the end of September. Then I had some time to prepare all the hand-off materials. I was supposed to take a week off and go on maternity leave a week before my due date, but my daughter came a week early.

I literally shipped my last feature on Friday, went to the hospital on Saturday, and had a baby.

Sprint week is not life at Replit. That 5-8 p.m. period is family time. That's something that I will hold sacred until the day I die. I'm going to have dinner with my kids, and then maybe log back in and finish things up if I need to.

More immature companies in tech tend to think that parents are too distracted. There are a lot of benefits to hiring parents. They bring a kind of time management that you don't develop until you have kids.