At Charta Health, Waterloo co-op students take on work that matters
A Waterloo alumnus created Charta Health’s co-op program to give students meaningful experience — and quickly discovered students could take on a much bigger role than expected.
By: Matthew King
When Raiyan Aaijaz began his first co-op term at Charta Health, an AI-powered platform that automates medical chart review and billing compliance for healthcare providers, he wanted to combine his interests in healthcare and technology.
The Biomedical Engineering student found an opportunity to work directly with clients, contribute to production code and help build technology that could improve health-care administration.
“It's not just one big project during the co-op term,” Aaijaz says. “I get to work with production code, and all my changes do end up in production for clients to see.”
Company snapshot
- Industry: Health and artificial intelligence (AI)
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Years in operation: 4
- Terms as a Waterloo co-op employer: 3
- Key co-op roles: Software Engineer
Built with Waterloo in mind
Charta’s co-op program was championed by Siddarth Surana, a Waterloo Computer Science and Statistics alum who joined the startup as its sixth employee.
As the company grew, Surana pushed for a co-op program, drawing on his own Waterloo experiences and the value he saw in giving students meaningful work.
“I'd gotten so much value out of it, and I'd seen how impactful it could be for any company,” Surana says. “Because scaling a small company is extremely difficult, I thought this would be a win-win for co-op students and the company.”
Charta hired its first three Waterloo co-op students in January 2026. The experience quickly changed the company's expectations for what students could contribute.
By the end of their first month, students were owning individual projects while working closely with mentors.
Siddharth Surana, Software Engineer at Charta Health
The amount of ownership that they had is basically equivalent to having a new grad or even maybe beyond a new grad working in your office.
That ownership can extend beyond technical work. Students who demonstrate the capability and interest can also take on client-facing responsibilities, including leading customer interactions.
From student to client-facing engineer
Aaijaz started working with a mentor on a single client. As he became more comfortable with Charta's systems, his role expanded to other clients.
“They actually started bringing me up not as a co-op student, but almost a full-time engineer on other clients,” Aaijaz says. “That's when I felt like, now, I'm actually part of the team.”
The experience has also pushed Aaijaz to develop skills beyond engineering, particularly communication and working directly with clients.
For Charta, that trust has created value on both sides. The company found that co-op students have increased their capacity to take on customer implementations and provide highly customized support.
Making an impact behind the scenes
Aaijaz was drawn to Charta because of its focus on health care, but the impact of his work became especially tangible while reviewing medical notes during quality assurance.
Raiyan Aaijaz, Biomedical Engineering co-op student
“I can see there are a lot of issues the patient might be going through,” he says.
“And the fact that we're trying to help them by ensuring that they're getting billed accurately has a lot of meaning.”
The patients whose records he encounters may never know about the work happening behind the scenes.
“Knowing that we're making a difference even without them actually knowing feels a bit different,” Aaijaz says.
For Surana, creating those opportunities brings his own Waterloo experience full circle. He continues to lead Charta’s co-op program because he wants students to have the opportunity he once had.
For Aaijaz, that opportunity has meant moving quickly from learning to contributing.
And for Charta, it has shown that co-op students can be more than future talent: they can help build the company today.