Daniel Zhang

Education

University of Waterloo

Anticipated Graduation: April 2028

Bachelor of Computer Science, Honours

- Dean's Honours List | Cumulative Average: 96.4%, Major Average: 99%

Experience

Software Engineer Intern

May 2026 - Aug 2026

Ramp | New York City, NY

- Incoming backend engineering intern for Summer 2026.

Engineering Intern

May 2025 - Aug 2025

Shopify | Toronto, ON

- On the Shopify Payments team, accelerated a critical GraphQL mutation by 90% by implementing asynchronous jobs for payment provider (e.g. Stripe) syncs, eliminating latency during settings updates.
- Engineered an internal Ruby tool that automated international terms of service updates across 39 countries, saving significant engineering hours.
- Strengthened codebase stability by refactoring legacy payment logic to enforce strict typing, ensuring clearer error reporting and logging.

Research Assistant

Dec 2024 - Present

University of Waterloo | Waterloo, ON

- Contributed to RankLLM, a Python machine learning/reranking framework, by integrating OpenRouter support, expanding the toolkit's compatibility to hundreds of additional LLMs and significantly enhancing its flexibility.
- Integrated Document Screenshot Embedding (DSE) into Pyserini, a Python information retrieval (IR) toolkit, to enable multimodal encoding and retrieval, directly supporting experimentation for an upcoming IR research paper (targeting SIGIR).

Software Developer Intern

Apr 2024 - Apr 2025

Utility Automation Solutions

- Architected and developed a Windows application using C# and WPF to automate the analysis of power system fault data, increasing productivity for 20+ engineers.

Projects

CapySpend

React, PostgreSQL, Express.js, Node.js, OpenAI API

- Developed a full-stack web app for personalized financial management, leveraging the OpenAI API to allow users to conversationally query their spending habits and bank data.
- Engineered an agentic AI system that intelligently parses transactional history to dynamically create budgets and suggest actionable savings goals, providing users with proactive financial advice.

Vim-Inspired Text Editor for C/C++

C++, OpenAI API

- Engineered a low-latency, modal text editor in C++ supporting 30+ Vim commands, macros, and split-views, utilizing RAII principles and smart pointers to ensure memory safety.
- Implemented an AI code-completion feature by embedding the OpenAI API directly into the CLI loop, allowing users to apply code generation without leaving the terminal environment.

Awards and Achievements

Schulich Leader Scholarship

Awarded the $100,000 Schulich Leader Scholarship, Canada's most prestigious scholarship for entrepreneurial-minded STEM undergraduates.

Competitive Programming

Advanced to the Gold division (top 10%) in the USA Computing Olympiad and achieved three consecutive top 5% finishes in the Senior Division of the Canadian Computing Competition, demonstrating strong problem-solving and algorithm design skills.

Skills

Languages: Java, Python, C++, C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, Ruby
Frameworks & Libraries: React, React Native, Next.js, Node.js, Express.js, WPF, Ruby on Rails
Databases & Tools: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Git, Linux