Full Stack AI developer · Toronto

Hey! I’m Nikolas.

I build AI applications at Intact’s Data Lab, from their interfaces to the services behind them.

Experience

AI Developer I @ Intact Insurance

Mar 2025 – Present

I spent a year leading frontend development for production AI applications. Since then, I’ve expanded my scope to include backend development and automated testing. I’m currently building an end-to-end test suite to improve confidence in production deployments.

Software Developer Intern @ IBM

May 2022 – Aug 2023

Built Python automation estimated to save internal account-management teams more than 500 hours of manual work per week.

Education

Engineering Science @ University of Toronto

BASc · Machine Intelligence

Sep 2019 – May 2024

Built a broad foundation in mathematics, science, and engineering in years 1 and 2, followed by a specialization in Machine Intelligence in years 3 and 4.

The Machine Intelligence curriculum covered machine learning, artificial intelligence, probabilistic reasoning, matrix algebra, and optimization.

Featured work

Professional experience

Production AI engineering at Intact

  • Frontend ownership

    Led React and TypeScript development for a year, extending shared application code for additional teams.

  • Backend modernization

    Migrated a FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend from synchronous to asynchronous I/O across database access, downstream-service clients, and API endpoints.

  • Testing and delivery

    Building an end-to-end test suite that provisions real AWS resources and invokes services directly. Also write Vitest and pytest tests, maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines, and contribute to infrastructure through Terraform.

02

Undergraduate thesis · Sep 2023 - May 2024

Distilling Chess Intelligence

Built a pipeline to generate 15,000 Leela Chess Zero evaluations and compare nine compact models. The convolutional models fit the training data more closely but did not beat the linear baseline on held-out positions.

  • PyTorch
  • Knowledge distillation
  • CNNs
  • Experimental ML
Read the case study: Distilling Chess Intelligence
03

Engineering capstone · Sep 2023 - Dec 2023

Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection

Worked on CT-image preprocessing and results analysis in a five-person capstone with Trillium Health Partners. Evaluation on 78,545 public test images showed strong overall detection alongside substantial weaknesses in individual hemorrhage subtypes.

  • Python
  • pydicom
  • Medical imaging
  • Model evaluation
Eight grayscale axial CT slices arranged in two rows.
Example CT slices · Source: Kaggle
Read the case study: Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection

Tools I work with

Product engineering

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • Vitest & pytest

Cloud & infrastructure

  • AWS
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • Linux

AI & machine learning

  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • scikit-learn
  • Computer vision