Krithika Kannan

About

I didn’t grow up around Silicon Valley - I grew up in Qatar, where my first exposure to tech wasn’t AI hype or startup culture. It was curiosity. In 9th grade, I started joining hackathons - not because I knew what machine learning was, but because I loved building things that didn’t exist the day before. That curiosity evolved into a fascination with intelligent systems: how data can predict behavior, how software can scale decisions, and how code can quietly transform entire workflows. Today, I’m a Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo specializing in AI, building at the intersection of software engineering and data science. At the Royal Bank of Canada, I develop production-grade automation systems that power financial workflows handling high-stakes transactions. Working in banking taught me precision - how to write resilient systems, test rigorously, and think in terms of scale, reliability, and real-world constraints. Previously, at the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority, I engineered anomaly detection pipelines and predictive analytics dashboards that improved financial data integrity. That experience shifted my mindset from “automate the task” to “un

Experience

Education