Software Developer Extern

This was CPSC 319, UBC's software engineering project course — an industry-applications, co-op-style class where teams build a real system for a real sponsor instead of a toy assignment. PwC was our sponsor, and the brief was a Health and Safety incident system: something frontline teams could actually use to log, track, and understand safety incidents, built and delivered on a hard deadline.

I ended up leading a team of 8 developers and analysts — splitting up the work, keeping progress on track, and making sure the people talking to PwC and the people writing code were always working off the same picture.

We shipped a full-stack prototype on Google Cloud: Firestore as the NoSQL data layer, Cloud Run for serverless hosting, and Next.js on the front end. Before any of that got written, though, we spent real time with stakeholders defining what the system actually needed to do — a Health and Safety tool is only useful if it matches how incidents actually get reported and reviewed, not how a textbook says they should.

The feature I'm most proud of was a generative AI chatbot built on Vertex AI, layered on top of the incident data so people could ask questions in plain language instead of digging through a table of past reports. It cut query response time by about 25% — a small number that mattered a lot to people trying to spot a trend before it became a pattern.

The part of the course that stuck with me most wasn't the code — it was presenting progress and the business case directly to senior PwC stakeholders. Translating what the team had built into something a business audience could actually act on, without losing what made it technically real, is a different skill than writing the system in the first place. It's one I've leaned on in almost every role since.