17 min read
A Waterloo Student's Honest Recruiting Recap 2025/2026
From zero interviews to 30+ rounds including startups, unicorns, and FAANG. The unfiltered version.
- career
- personal
Hi, I'm Rick.
>
From the model to the metal, I build it all.
a stonecutter hammering 100 times with no crack, then it splits on the 101st...
Open to Summer 2027 co-op
UWaterloo
UWaterlooMy experience
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Software Engineer
Led the initial implementation of a C# transaction verification service for the X1/Westcor ecosystem, extending a RED-only check to three-state RED/YELLOW/GREEN suppression logic with LMBRU underwriter notifications. Contributed to the X1 Extended Update integration automating abstract retrieval across 28 states, realizing ~$1M in annual savings, and migrated CI/CD to Argo Rollouts to enable canary deployments.
January 2026 – April 2026
AI Engineer
University of Waterloo IST
Built JADA, an AI-powered job ingestion and recommendation pipeline in collaboration with Microsoft Canada, designing a KNN-based classifier using Cosmos DB Vector Search, and developing full-stack portal services (resume search, profile-based recommendations, InStage integration) supporting 42,500+ users per term.
May 2025 - August 2025 logo](/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic%2Fmedia%2Finspur.1ce32c51.png&w=96&q=75){kind=small}
AI Engineer
Built the RAG document-ingestion pipeline for a low-code LLM application platform, converting heterogeneous documents (PDF, PPTX, Excel) into normalized Markdown, then chunking, embedding, and indexing into a Milvus vector store. Optimized chunking strategy via an evaluation harness, reducing retrieval errors by 30%, and designed an OCR fallback for scanned documents. Curated and labeled training data to fine-tune a Surya OCR model, improving text and table extraction on image-based formats.
September 2024 - December 2024My projects
MindGo
Made with:
A personal finance app built around the academic term rather than the calendar month, windowing every report on real term boundaries. Tracks transactions in six currencies with read-time conversion, alongside savings goals, a live investment watchlist, and AI-generated plans grounded in the user's own spending. Market data falls through a three-source chain (Finnhub → Yahoo Finance → Alpha Vantage), so a missing key degrades rather than breaks. Bilingual EN/ZH. 100+ users in production.
AI Sentiment Pulse
Made with:
Led the ML work on a 9-member WAT.ai team building a market sentiment analytics system, fine-tuning DeBERTa-v3 for sentiment and sarcasm detection. Aggregated model outputs with unsupervised statistical methods to produce real-time sentiment signals from social media, and correlated those signals against financial data APIs to surface tradeable trends.
SlopFish
Made with:
Modified the Stockfish chess engine to create Slopfish, a forced-capture variant engine running on a single-core, multi-threaded CPU. Implemented engine-level changes in C++, used Polyglot for opening book format conversion to ensure XBoard compatibility, and trained a variant-specific NNUE using GPU acceleration. Leveraged Minimax with Alpha-Beta pruning for move selection and Zobrist hashing for efficient board state representation.
AGE Game Engine
Made with:
Architected a C++20 module-based MVC game engine for 2D ASCII games, currently supporting Space Invaders and Snake. Implemented core engine systems including rendering, input handling, game loop management, and collision detection. Designed a flexible Entity-Component System (ECS) for modular game object management, enabling easy extension with new entities and behaviors. Games inherit from a base GameEngine class and implement virtual methods for game-specific logic, streamlining new game development.
My Education
Bachelor of Mathematics
University of Waterloo
2023 - 2027
- Major in Computational Mathematics
- Major in Statistics
- Minor in Combinatorics and Optimization
- Minor in Computing (Computer Science)
- Activities: Core Member at Waterloo Blockchain Club; ML Lead at WAT.ai (Sentiment Pulse); Basketball Intramurals
Blog
7 min read
Echoes of the City of Angels
Story of spending a month’s salary to bridge the gap between a 14-year-old’s childhood fantasy and the raw, beautiful, and fractured reality of Los Angeles
- travel
- personal
Contact me
Please contact me directly at m69liu@uwaterloo.ca or through this form.