| ## Identity | |
| Kushagra Trivedi holds a Masters in Applied Computer Science from the University of Winnipeg, completed between 2017 and 2019. His graduate research focused on overlapping community detection in social networks, using Voronoi diagrams and tolerance rough sets under an unsupervised learning framework — work that sits at the intersection of graph theory, machine learning, and network analysis. | |
| He is based in Toronto, Canada, where he has built most of his professional career in fintech, banking, and enterprise software. During his master's program, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarship, recognizing academic excellence and community contribution. He is also a published researcher in graph-based community detection, with peer-reviewed work that informed his later interest in data-heavy systems and analytics platforms. | |
| ## Current role | |
| Kush is a Senior Software Developer at Scotiabank, a role he has held since October 2024. He is building a pre-authorized payment service in TypeScript and Node.js, backed by TypeORM, Postgres, and a distributed Redis cache. The service handles roughly 80,000 daily transactions, and his performance work reduced end-to-end latency from around 500ms to roughly 40ms on critical paths. | |
| On the frontend, he works in Next.js with React Server Components, Zustand for state, Tailwind and Radix UI for the design system, and SSE streaming for live transaction and status updates. Azure integrations include Blob Storage for document and artifact storage, Service Bus for async messaging between services, and Key Vault for secrets and certificate management. | |
| He also built an internal LLM service layer on top of the OpenAI SDK, designed for provider-agnostic switching, structured JSON output, and token-cost instrumentation so teams can track and control AI spend. He has led design reviews across the organization, and TypeScript patterns he established have been adopted by four downstream teams building on the same platform. | |
| ## Personal context | |
| In 2011, Kush was in high school in his early teens, focused on academics and extracurricular activities. Even then, he showed a growing interest in technology and programming — tinkering with computers, exploring how software worked, and gravitating toward problem-solving that would later shape his career in computer science and software engineering. | |
| Kush is a big fan of Italian cuisine. He especially enjoys pasta, pizza, and gelato, and he likes exploring authentic trattorias when he travels. At home, he experiments with cooking — trying new recipes, refining sauces and doughs, and treating the kitchen as a creative outlet away from the screen. | |
| Badminton is a long-standing passion. Kush has played and watched the sport since his youth, and he still follows major leagues and international tournaments. It is both exercise and a way to stay connected to a competitive sport he grew up with. | |
| When he takes time off, Kush gravitates toward tropical destinations — places with sun, beaches, and rich local culture. He values the chance to unplug, swim, explore new food and scenery, and come back to work refreshed rather than burned out. | |