Software Developer II · Ottawa, Canada
Sebastien Girard
High-throughput backends. Clean frontends. AI platform engineering.
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Leadership
Beyond the Code
AI Leadership
Lead — Tech Trekker Forum
Cision Ltd. · December 2024 – Present
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- Scaled the group by 35% to 51 members across multiple R&D pillars by increasing engagement and broadening scope.
- Delivered 23 technology presentations over the year, consistently driving awareness of emerging tools like Langfuse, Google ADK/A2A, AG-UI, Speckit, and BMAD.
- Accelerated company-wide AI adoption: championed AI coding tooling like OpenCode, MCP servers, and agent workflows, now actively used by developers across teams.
- Authored a framework for developing, testing, and deploying AI-generated code.
LangfuseGoogle ADKMCPOpenCodeAG-UI
Engineering Leadership
President & Avionics Lead
uOttawa Rocketry Team · 2019 – 2024
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- Led a 30+ member multidisciplinary team to a successful flight of a 3m tall rocket with 8 kN of thrust, reaching Mach 1.7 and 23,000 ft.
- As President, oversaw all operations: strategic planning, project management, safety, people management, legal and insurance compliance, budget and funding, and sponsor relations.
- Architected the Primary Flight Computer in C++ with safety-critical systems, real-time event detection, and ground support systems for a hybrid rocket engine.
C++Embedded SystemsFSM
AI & Robotics
Team Lead — Drone Inspection Ground Control
Qualitics · 2023 – 2024
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- Led a team of 4 building a ground control station for Qualitics' automated powerline inspections — guiding drone operators in real time on image quality, drone positioning relative to the tower, camera settings, and capture stability.
- Built a digital twin of transmission towers in Unreal Engine 4 and integrated a custom-trained AI segmentation model producing near-real-time tower masks in the field — catching blurred or overexposed captures before crews leave the site.
- The project's success supported Qualitics' expansion from Belgium into the Canadian market, where I became one of their main North-American contacts.
AIComputer VisionUnreal EngineDrones
Public Speaking
Panelist — AI & Digital Twins
AIEQ Forum · 2024
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- Represented Qualitics — the Belgian drone-inspection startup I helped bring to the Canadian market — at the AIEQ Forum on the digital transformation of energy systems, alongside CIMA+ and Hydro-Québec.
- Discussed AI-guided maintenance strategies — from autonomous drone data collection to digital twins — and extracting meaningful insight from big data.
- The panel's success opened business opportunities with local hydro companies in the months that followed.
Public SpeakingAIDigital TwinsEnergy
Experience
Work History
- Built an internal AI developer platform with a full-stack React frontend and REST API backend — providing standardized editor configuration, company MCP server setup, multi-repo workspaces for agentic coding, and a shared library for prompts, instructions, and agent definitions. Piloted with 3 projects before presenting to the full R&D organization for adoption.
- Helped mitigate a multi-million dollar/year business risk by joining a high-priority team to resolve a critical provider dependency. Designed multiple core services and integrated a new external API using Java 21, Spring Boot, and Spring Kafka. Validated performance at 200M+ messages/month.
- Delivered real-time client insights by designing a high-throughput analytics pipeline processing 4,000 events/second with reactive programming, multithreading, and horizontal scaling.
- Implemented and scaled a polarity scoring feature to 45M+ documents/day. Used Resilience4j, circuit breakers, batching, and automatic retries to ensure resiliency. Monitored the deployment across 22 production pipelines with Grafana.
- Launched a product review monitoring solution, ingesting hundreds of thousands of reviews daily to surface actionable insights for client product teams. Designed an orchestrator service that manages jobs with a finite state machine.
- Saved $6K/month by leading end-to-end delivery of a scalable content archive with replay capability, replacing a costly cloud-hosted solution. Delivered 2× production throughput, 6+ month retention, full unit/E2E/performance test coverage with JUnit and Testcontainers to guarantee delivery.
- Led automated database maintenance, and independently authored a cross-team incident recovery plan during a critical infrastructure outage — adopted by engineering leads to prevent recurrence.
BASc Software Engineering
University of Ottawa
Magna Cum Laude · 5 co-op terms: uOttawa BioGenie, Cision (×2), Spiria Inc. & Motorola Solutions
Stack
Technologies
Backend
Spring BootSpring CloudWebFluxResilience4jKafkaDockerKubernetesGCPTerraformMicroservices
AI & ML
Google ADKMCPLangChain/LangGraphRAGAI AgentsScikit-Learn
Practices
System DesignTDDJUnitTestcontainersCI/CDArgoCDGrafanaPrometheusRESTful APIAgile
Databases
PostgreSQLElasticsearchMongoDB
Languages
JavaPythonTypeScriptCC++C#JavaScriptSQL
Frontend
ReactNext.jsMUITanStack Table
Connect
Let's Talk
Languages
EnglishFrench
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