James Kidd.
I design reliable data systems and internal tools
Internships
Distribution Enablement Co-op
May 2026 — Aug 2026- Automated fund performance reporting into Seismic LiveDocs with the enablement team (.NET, SQL, Cinchy), saving the Equities Investment Advisory group 40+ hours per month.
- Benchmarked CI funds against competitors on since-inception metrics unavailable through Morningstar's API; built the Excel analytics workbook on a Python-generated data layer for Power Query.
- Analyzed Sales team adoption and client engagement patterns to design a new content schema and SharePoint reorganization supporting the ETF/Mutual Fund advisory merger and the Invesco Canada transition.
Investment Advisory Analyst Co-op
Jan 2026 — Apr 2026- Identified a Quebec language-law compliance bottleneck and built an automated translation workflow (Morningstar bulk data + custom glossaries), reducing a 146-page manual task to 34 pages across 34 Know-Your-Product documents.
- Researched capital-flow trends for portfolio-manager macro commentaries on hyperscaler capex funding and legacy SaaS disruption.
- Drafted positioning collateral for the Global Alpha Innovators, Emerging Markets, and Small Cap funds for global distribution.
Software Developer Intern
May 2024 — Sep 2024- Wrote Python/SQL automation for data migration between production and test MariaDB environments; built data-extraction and order-conversion tools for Jira workflows.
Technology Enablement Advisor Intern
Jun 2021 — Sep 2021- Analyzed client operational workflows and proposed UiPath RPA automation designs to senior advisors.
Leadership
President
2024 — Present- Progressed from participant (2023) to Logistics Lead (2024–25) to President (2026) of McGill's largest hackathon; currently leading a 12-person team to deliver a 400-person campus event on November 26, 2026.
- Partnered with IBM and enterprise sponsors to design a framework for hosting and judging agentic AI submissions; restructured the competition around AI-native development lifecycles, including token equity across participants.
Director of Sponsorships
2021 — 2022- Managed sponsor relations for Queen's annual cybersecurity hackathon.
Math and computer science student at McGill, graduating December 2026, with two co-op terms at CI Global Asset Management in data analysis, automation, and advisor communications. President of McGill CodeJam, the university's largest engineering hackathon. Bilingual in English and French, based in Montreal and open to Toronto.
Education Timeline
McGill University
2023 — 2026Coursework: Applied ML, AI, Algorithm Design, Operating Systems, Probability, Statistics, Numerical Analysis, Big Data, Computational Theory. Exchange term at the University of Glasgow.
Queen's University
2020 — 2022Senator Frank Carrel Merit Scholarship, Dean's Honour List.
Skills & Expertise
Languages
Data & ML
Infra
Finance Tools
Spoken Languages
Selected Projects
Deterministic Vision Pipeline
FeaturedA classical computer vision pipeline that segments imagery into discrete color regions without neural networks. Next step: applying the same segmentation to satellite vegetation time-series for crop-yield tracking. Paint-by-Number is the sandbox.
SquashNoFriends
'23 — First pseudo-AI agentSquash matchmaking platform built at McGill CodeJam. Fed an LLM ambiguous schedule descriptions and watched it return structured data. That was the moment.
Offline Mode
There's life beyond coding. As much as I enjoy building software, I value time spent outdoors and traveling.