Xander
van Pelt.

Founder & Lead Developer

• Founded and independently engineered a production EdTech platform with TypeScript/React, Node/Express, Python/Flask, FastMCP, MySQL, Stripe, and Google APIs.
• Built a proprietary LLM harness for an “always-on” AI agent that acts as an academic advisor and assistant to students.
• Implemented a variation of Anthropic’s 2024 Contextual Retrieval system to index and vectorize student-uploaded notes, syllabi, and learning resources. Passage-level provenance ties AI-generated claims to source material; deletion and reprocessing revoke outdated evidence.
• Built a controlled runtime for interactive AI lessons, allowing models to inject learning widgets into a live chat stream. Vector search over hundreds of components, reranking, and a fast approval model select widgets in real time.
• Engineered Google Classroom synchronization resilient to revoked credentials, concurrent workers, and late notifications using per-user locking and scheduled fallback synchronization.

Technical Lead

• Engineered an automated newsletter pipeline processing 800+ Southeast Asian articles daily for 4,000+ subscribers using a custom web scraper, NLP categorization, and LLM summaries at three lengths.
• Built a Discord bot through which writers scrape and summarize articles, group related coverage across perspectives, and draft newsletters.
• Designed a pipeline from RSS feeds and site URLs through proxied HTTP requests, Playwright and computer-use fallback, HTML cleanup, categorization, story analysis, and newsletter drafting.

Operations Research Intern

• Optimized parking allocation for Dusit Parkside & Residence, a 389-unit condominium, using models of parking-space value and room value.
• Consolidated spreadsheets and PDFs; valued spaces by elevator proximity, level, and width, and rooms by floor area and height.
• Applied global optimization to assign parking spaces; built visualization tools for operations teams and presented methods and results to project managers and the developer.

Software Engineer

• Developed and deployed a school-wide announcement and form-time application with OAuth 2.0 authentication, Google Cloud Platform integration, and the OpenAI API.

Independent Developer

Built an open-source Java 2D game engine from scratch with a custom rendering pipeline, physics system, entity-component architecture, asset management, and UI framework.

Bachelor of Computer Science, Honours, Co-op

Waterloo, Ontario

International Baccalaureate Diploma

Extended Essay in Computer Science
SAT: 1500 (750 Math, 750 EBRW)