Available Sep – Dec 2026 · Co-op · Ottawa, Canada

Hi, I'm Palash Thakur

I build scalable backend systems and applied-AI products — currently a Security Software Developer Co-op at Nokia and an MEng candidate at the University of Ottawa (CGPA 9.6/10). Previously, I led backend engineering for Intuit's QuickBooks Finance Agent, serving 1M+ users.

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Years of experience
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Users served at Intuit
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Students mentored
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Peer-reviewed papers

About

Engineer at the intersection of scale, AI, and security

Palash Thakur
Ottawa, ON, Canada
MEng ECE @ uOttawa · CGPA 9.6/10
Security Software Dev @ Nokia
Open to Sep–Dec 2026 co-op

I'm a software engineer with 4+ years of experience designing cloud-native backend services and production AI systems for finance, healthcare, and telecom security.

At Nokia, I work on security software — building a lightweight In-Service Upgrade and rollback system (35% lower resource usage, 40% faster upgrades), assessing vulnerabilities across product components, and creating agentic-AI workflow automations that cut triage and investigation effort by 30–40% across security engineering teams.

Before that, I spent nearly four years at Persistent Systems as a Senior Software Engineer, where I led a team of three delivering backend services for Intuit's QuickBooks Finance Agent (1M+ customers), cut high-traffic API response times by 66%, and built NLP and ML pipelines for healthcare clients including Harvard Medical School and Connxus HIE.

Outside of work, I contribute upstream to Keycloak (IAM), publish open-source Python tooling featured by the National Library of Medicine, and have mentored 8K+ students through Google Cloud developer community programs.

Career

Experience & Education

MAY 2026 – PRESENTOttawa, Canada

Security Software Developer Co-op

Nokia

  • Built a lightweight In-Service Upgrade (ISU) & rollback system — 35% less upgrade-time resource usage, 40% faster execution, 50% faster rollback recovery.
  • Shipped AI workflow automations for security teams, cutting repetitive triage and investigation effort by 30–40%.
  • Developed an AI assistant connecting JIRA, Confluence, codebases, and docs — reducing legacy-code investigation time by 25%+.
  • Assessed vulnerabilities across product components: exploitability, affected code paths, and remediation.
  • Created reusable agentic AI skills adopted across 5+ security engineering workflows.
SEP 2025 – APR 2027Ottawa, Canada

MEng, Electrical & Computer Engineering

University of Ottawa

  • CGPA 9.60 / 10.00 — focus on design of scalable intelligent systems.
DEC 2021 – AUG 2025India · Clients: Intuit, Connxus HIE, Harvard Medical School

Senior Software Engineer

Persistent Systems

  • Led a team of 3 engineers delivering backend services for QuickBooks Finance Agent — 1M+ customers.
  • Optimized high-traffic REST endpoints, cutting average response time by 66% for QuickBooks Pro users.
  • Delivered FastAPI services connecting React UIs to LLM endpoints for an AI-assist chatbot at ~10k calls/hr.
  • Raised automated test coverage to 99%, reducing post-release defects by 70%; improved PostgreSQL performance by 40%.
  • Built NLP, UMLS, and ML pipelines for EMR extraction and clinical research, plus AWS HealthLake workflows.
AUG 2018 – MAY 2022Nagpur, India

BE, Electronics Engineering · Minor in Computer Science

Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management

  • CGPA 9.30 / 10.00 · Best Paper Award at ICESC-2020 for traffic-sign detection research.

Community

Open-Source Contributions

Keycloak — Identity & Access Management

Upstream contributions to one of the most widely used open-source IAM platforms: improved OIDC token-introspection client-authentication error handling, Admin Console timestamp display, and HMAC terminology.

umls-python-client — Published Package

Authored and maintain a Python package for the UMLS REST APIs, recognized by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and listed on its official UMLS community resources page.

Toolbox

Skills & Technologies

Languages & Backend

PythonSQLBash FastAPISQLAlchemyREST APIs MicroservicesSplunk

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda)DockerKubernetes HelmTerraformNginxLinux

AI & Machine Learning

LLMsRAGFAISS Agentic WorkflowsNLPPrompt Engineering

Security

IAMAuthN / AuthZTLS Secrets HandlingHashingNetwork Security

Datastores & Testing

PostgreSQLMongoDBRedis PytestIntegration TestingLoad Testing

Tooling & Frontend

GitGitHub ActionsGitLab CI JenkinsReactStreamlitGraphviz

Spotlight

Talks, Media & Publications

Google Cloud Hackathon — 1st Place 🏆 Invited to Google's office to record the winning demo — 7.8K+ views
GEMS Mentorship — Persistent Systems Onboarding insights for new engineers
Google Cloud Hackathon Winner1st place — "Next Big Thing" Hackathon
Google Cloud APAC SpeakerYoung-developer keynote at #HumBanayenge, Google Cloud India
Best Paper AwardICESC-2020 — traffic-sign detection research
Mentorship at Scale8K+ students via Google Cloud community · 200+ undergrads at RCOEM

Contact

Let's build something together

Open to co-op roles (Sep–Dec 2026), research collaborations, and conversations about backend, AI, and security engineering.

Say hello 👋

The fastest way to reach me is email or LinkedIn — I usually reply within a day.

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