Annette
John
Software & AI Engineer. Researcher. Mountain chaser. Avid reader.
I build AI systems that matter — from safety-aware clinical ML to agentic developer tooling. When I'm not writing code, I'm chasing summits in the Rockies or losing myself in a good book.
5
Publications
4+
Years building
3
Countries lived
∞
Summits to climb
About
Human first,
engineer second.
I'm a Software & AI Engineer currently pioneering the AI/ML engineering practice at Urban Systems in Calgary. Before that, I spent two years at the University of Calgary doing ML research that genuinely mattered — building systems to help clinicians make better decisions for prostate cancer patients.
Before Canada, I was a software engineer at Credit Suisse in Pune, building the backend systems that move money across borders. I learned a lot about what "reliability" actually means when the stakes are real.
Outside of work, I'm drawn to the mountains — there's something about altitude and effort that resets my thinking better than anything else. I read widely, write occasionally, and believe the best engineers are the ones who stay curious about everything.
Career
Where I've worked.
Urban Systems
Software & Machine Learning Developer
Calgary, Canada
- Pioneering the company's first dedicated AI/ML engineering practice — directing AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) across the full development lifecycle.
- Building full-stack internal apps, REST APIs, and data pipelines with Python/Django and React; leveraging MCP integrations and agentic patterns to automate workflows.
- Establishing team-wide standards for agentic development and sharing effective practices across the org.
University of Calgary
Graduate Researcher & Teaching Assistant
Calgary, Canada
- Built production-oriented ML pipelines for large-scale temporal and multimodal EHR data on Google Cloud.
- Developed risk prediction, forecasting, and resource optimization models — including mixture-of-experts and container orchestration ML systems.
- Served as TA for CPSC 331, 433, 471, DATA 221, 601, 604, 605 — supporting instruction, tutorials, and assessment.
Credit Suisse (UBS AG)
Software Engineer
Pune, India
- Developed backend services (Java, SpringBoot) for international payment systems covering FX, securities, and high-value cross-border transactions per SWIFT/SIC standards.
- Spearheaded credentials migration to secret management, mitigating $50M+ in compliance risk. Led reconciliation tech stack migration saving ~$3M.
- Optimized high-contention datastore operations cutting latency by 60%; built internal tool automating SLM process, saving 24 hours/month.
Intellico Labs
Software Engineering Intern
Pune, India
- Led website development and SEO initiatives; recognized as Best Performer among 25 interns.
Projects
Things I've built.
Master's Thesis
TwinRx
Safety-aware digital twin ML system for inpatient risk prediction and treatment recommendation using large-scale EHR data. Novel mixture-of-experts model for subgroup-aware outcome prediction and causal inference pipelines.
Azure AI
OracleRAG
Retrieval Augmented Generation system integrating Azure AI Search + Azure OpenAI for factually-grounded answers. 95% accuracy, 90% retrieval precision through modular retrieval/generation design.
Predictive Container Orchestration
BiLSTM + Random Forest hybrid for cloud resource prediction, outperforming Kubernetes default scheduling. Reduced average job wait time by 28% via proactive container placement predictions.
Air Pollution Hotspot Detection
ML-driven geospatial analytics using Sentinel-5P satellite data to detect pollution hotspots and identify pollutant sources. Interactive maps for spatial interpretation.
Face Detection with AWS Rekognition
Cloud-based face detection application using AWS EC2, S3, and Rekognition for image processing and inference.
YelpCamp
Full-stack campground discovery and booking platform built with the MEAN stack. Passport.js authentication, MongoDB Atlas, deployed to production.
Life
Beyond the code.
The things that make me who I am when the terminal is closed.
The Pragmatic Programmer
David Thomas & Andrew Hunt
65% through
“Every chapter feels like a conversation with the engineers I wish I had met earlier. The 'broken windows' metaphor alone is worth the read.”
Recently finished
Banff National Park
Plain of Six Glaciers trail at sunrise
Lake Louise
Frozen lake in January — surreal silence
Kananaskis Country
Chester Lake loop in autumn colours
Johnston Canyon
Upper falls icefall in winter
Jasper National Park
Dark sky preserve, no words do it justice
Ha Ling Peak
Vertical scramble, 360° views of Canmore
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani et al.
Still the most elegant architectural decision in modern AI. The simplicity of self-attention as a universal mechanism is genuinely beautiful.
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4
Bubeck et al. (Microsoft Research)
The most thoughtful attempt I've seen to grapple seriously with what 'general intelligence' might mean in practice.
AlphaFold: A Solution to a 50-Year-Old Grand Challenge in Biology
Jumper et al. (DeepMind)
Proof that ML can genuinely solve problems that felt intractable. A reminder of why this field matters.
Causal Inference: What If
Hernán & Robins
Made me realize how much 'standard' ML ignores causality. Changed how I frame every modelling problem.
What Building AI Agents Actually Taught Me About Software Design
After months of directing Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot across a full dev lifecycle — here's what surprised me most about where humans still matter.
The Romanticization of the PhD
Nobody tells you that most of a research degree is quiet, unglamorous effort. And that's actually where the good stuff lives.
On Being an Immigrant in Tech
Moving from Pune to Calgary for a Master's while navigating a new country, a new culture, and a new career — some honest thoughts.
Research
Published work.
A Systematic Review of AI as a Digital Twin for Prostate Cancer Care
2024 · Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Elsevier
Towards Digital Twins in Prostate Cancer: A Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Multitask Prognostics in Hospital Admissions
2024 · Applied Sciences
Estimating Treatment Effects and Recommending Safe Drug Policies in Prostate Cancer Inpatients: A Causal Inference Approach towards Digital Twins
2024 · Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics
Predictive Container Orchestration in the Cloud using AI Techniques
2023 · Computing
Detection of Air Pollution Hotspots and its Sources using Deep Learning
2022 · Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research
Toolkit
What I work with.
Data & AI
AI Dev Tooling
Backend & APIs
Frontend
Data Stores
Cloud & DevOps
Contact
Let's connect.
Whether it's a project, a role, a research idea, or just a good book recommendation — I'd love to hear from you.