Loic Kandikandi

Software Developer

45.4201°N, 75.7003°W— Ottawa

Developer, amateur photographer, and massive music fan!

Experience

atMinicor (YC X26)

Feb 2025 - Present(1 yr 2 mos)FTToronto (Remote)

Employee #1 at YC-backed startup helping companies build scalable desktop automation workflows.

Next.jsKotlinSpring BootAzureVercel AI SDKPostHogBetter Stack

—Reduced storage costs 75% by simplifying data models, introducing cold storage tiering, and truncating oversized payloads.
—Re-architected workflow execution pipeline to stream incremental updates for long-running workflows.
—Built an AI chatbot (Vercel AI SDK) that generates and debugs integration workflows from user-attached docs and past execution context.
—Built execution console, step-level reruns, and an RPA event recorder that captures user interactions and feeds annotated action sequences into AI-assisted workflow generation.
—Owned 5 customer pilots end-to-end (e-commerce, healthcare, logistics), directly contributing to customer acquisition.
—Integrated PostHog for feature flagging, user analytics, and funnel tracking, enabling data-driven product decisions.

atCiena

Jan 2024 - Jan 2025(1 yr 1 mos)FTOttawa

Owned developer tooling and CI/CD automation for a multi-repo Yocto-based embedded product.

FlaskReactMongoDBGrafanaJenkinsYoctoGit

—Automated Coverity defect reporting by replacing a manual Excel process with a polling system, PostgreSQL database, and Grafana dashboards. Adopted across the org.
—Built a PR lifecycle tracker (Flask + React + MongoDB) correlating PRs with build validation results to reduce integration errors pre-merge. Adopted by a sister product team.
—Built Jenkins pipelines for multi-repo release branch creation and build config updates.

Internships

atSolace

May 2023 - Aug 2023(4 mos)INTRemote

Worked on the Event Portal product — a platform for designing event-driven systems at scale.

SpringReactJestGitHub Actions

—Built a feature flag system (Spring) enabling dynamic toggling without redeployment. Cut release lead times by 50%.
—Parallelized integration tests in GitHub Actions, reducing CI/CD pipeline build time by 3x.

atCision

Sep 2021 - Dec 2021(4 mos)INTOttawa

Press release distribution platform. Joined team building a unified content ingestion pipeline.

JavaAWS KinesisJUnitMockitoKubernetesArgo CDDatadogKibana

—Built a microservice processing 500k+ articles/min from AWS Kinesis streams, normalizing 100+ field mappings across heterogeneous sources into a standardized format.
—Deployed to Kubernetes via Argo CD. Configured Datadog dashboards and alerts for throughput, latency, and failure detection.
—Won 1st place at company hackathon by building a Slack bot that traces articles across the ingestion pipeline. Demoed to CTO.

atCanada Revenue Agency

May 2020 - Aug 2020(4 mos)INTOttawa

Researched NLP techniques to accelerate the auditing process across large volumes of unstructured text.

PythonNLPCorExHaystackGoogle Colab

—Built and tested topic extraction (CorEx) and question-answering (Haystack) prototypes on 5 years of internal audit reports; presented findings to branch director.
—Delivered a recommendation report that was adopted into actionable projects within the Auditing Evaluation Branch.