Software engineering grad tackles the housing crisis

When Bilal Akhtar graduated from Waterloo’s software engineering program in 2019 he saw a bright future ahead. Not only had he landed a dream job at Cockroach Labs, a database company where he interned during his undergraduate degree, but he also led the company’s expansion to create a Toronto-based office.

“Cockroach Labs are based in New York, but I wanted to stay in Toronto for a number of reasons,” Bilal said. “So, I asked them, ‘Would you be willing to let me start an office here and help recruit people?’ They were and since then we’ve grown the Toronto office from two people to the 21 it is today, a group of professionals that includes software engineers as far away as Waterloo.”

Read the feature article on the website of the Cheriton School of Computer Science.