Hi! I'm Rick.

I study software engineering at the University of Waterloo.

In my free time, you can find me playing varsity tennis for UWaterloo, eating pasta, or singing carpool karaoke with my friends.

Resume

Experience

Citadel

Software Engineering Intern•Jun 2025 - Aug 2025

Built AI tooling system to automate financial document analysis.

Databricks

Software Engineering Intern•Jan 2025 - Apr 2025

Used Scala to create a Bazel event streaming service, allowing engineers to view test failures up to 20x faster.

Amazon

Software Engineering Intern•May 2024 - Jul 2024

Created AI agent to handle ~10% of support tickets, cutting MTTR by ~40% and saving ~190 engineer hours per year.

Autodesk

Software Engineering Intern•Sep 2023 - Dec 2023

Rewrote and enhanced user feedback service for 7.5M users by queueing tasks with Amazon SQS and async workers.

Fortinet

Software Developer Intern•Jan 2023 - May 2023

Implemented HTTP/3 and QUIC packet inspection for webfilter using Go, improving webfilter speeds for over 600,000 customers.

Fedica

Software Engineering Intern•Apr 2022 - Aug 2022

Designed and implemented multilingual sentiment analysis model for tweets for over 1 million users using Python.

Check out some of my work!

Lucid - Text to Movie

Lucid - Text to Movie

Paste in a text and Lucid will identify the key scenes before turning it into a narrated movie. Be it a favourite book, historical battle, or an impassioned rant about the weather. Anything and everything, if you can read it, Lucid can dream it. Finalists out of 1000 participants at Hack the North 2022, Canada's largest hackathon. Skills: Python, React, Diffusion Models

Transformerr - Transformer Model from scratch

Transformerr - Transformer Model from scratch

My implementation of a transformer model from scratch, based on the paper, "Attention is All You Need". Skills: Python, PyTorch

Pitch.ai - Intelligent speech-to-slides

Pitch.ai - Intelligent speech-to-slides

There are millions of people around the world who have a physical or learning disability which makes creating visual presentations extremely difficult. They may be visually impaired, suffer from ADHD, or have disabilities like Parkinson's. For these people, being unable to create presentations isn’t just a hassle. It’s a barrier to learning, a reason for feeling left out, or a career disadvantage in the workplace. Meet Pitch.ai. Voted 1st place at Western Canada's largest hackathon by panelists from Microsoft, TTT Studios, and Covalent. Skills: Flask, Python

Clickfait - clickbait detection

Clickfait - clickbait detection

Detect whether a title is clickbait or not with 96% accuracy. Created using a BERT transformer. Skills: Tensorflow, Keras, Python, AWS, PostgreSQL, Express, JavaScript

Chessism - Chess engine and chess bot.

Chessism - Chess engine and chess bot.

Made a chess engine and a basic chess bot with alpha-beta pruning. Mostly done to learn about design patterns. Skills: C++, X11 lib

Get in touch!

Feel free to contact me in any of these ways:

LinkedIn
rickzhang7