Rowan Burns-Kirkness

Rowan Burns-Kirkness has a wealth of experience in software engineering and development. From 2013 to 2016, they worked as a private tutor, teaching elementary school children in math, science, and technology. In 2016, they worked as a Junior Test Engineer at AVST, writing Java and Ruby code for voicemail services with 20 million users worldwide. They also learned SQL on the job and used it to update the company's queries for a pending database update. In the same year, they worked as an Engineer Intern at Centre for Heart and Lung Innovation, writing an image registration tool for 3D CT scans in MATLAB that saved doctors up to 30 minutes per CT scan. They also made software architecture decisions as the sole engineer on a multidisciplinary team. In 2018, they worked as an Engineer Intern at Delta-Q Technologies, designing and creating user interfaces in C# with direct revenue applications. They also worked using an Agile methodology for the design cycle, and performed and received code reviews. In the same year, they worked as a Junior Researcher at ATR Institute International, working with mentors to create a VQA (video question answering) agent using Python. They also applied classroom machine learning techniques to improve the agent's training pipeline using CUDA, and created a web app to demonstrate said VQA network at conferences. In 2019, they worked as an Engineer Intern at Change.org, working as a full stack developer in JavaScript and React. They upgraded and deployed their spam detection Lambda in Java hosted through AWS, reducing abusive petitions seen on the site. Currently, they are working as a Software Engineer at A Thinking Ape.

Rowan Burns-Kirkness attended Eric Hamber Secondary from 2012 to 2014, completing a High School degree. Rowan then attended the University of Victoria from 2014 to 2020, graduating with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Software Engineering.