William Gervasio

Software Engineering & Machine Learning

Hello there!

I am Software Engineer at Instacart!

My current work revolves around receipt images and actions we take after understanding that info.

My research work focused on computer vision and machine learning methods in medicine.

My startup ventures utilized computer vision and large language models to automate repetitive tasks.

I've led programs for 180,000 students and led tech industry events with over 30 top tech companies.

I want to work on hard problems affecting a lot of people.

5 years of Computer Science at UBC.

20 mo. of full-time internships.

12 mo. of software engineering work.

12 mo. of machine learning research.

180,000 students managed.

4 conference presentations

30 partnerships established.

4 years of teaching CS.

5 years of Computer Science at UBC.

20 mo. of full-time internships.

12 mo. of software engineering work.

12 mo. of machine learning research.

180,000 students managed.

4 conference presentations

30 partnerships established.

4 years of teaching CS.

Experience

  1. Mar 2025 - Present

    Software Engineer II

    Instacart

    • Working on the receipt recognition workstream in Python and Ruby, affecting over 86% of transactions.
  2. July 2024 - Mar 2025

    Software Engineer I

    Instacart

    • Improved Python receipt ML systems to match 30% more items and fix 6% more orders that affect $1 million savings.
    • Optimized training speed by 20x of Databricks pipelines responsible for 50% impact by rewriting UDFs into pySpark.
    • Established 4 review tools for ML models using Airflow, Snowflake and Ruby, enabling 20% more reviews from agents and decreasing error rate by 5%.
  3. September 2023 - December 2023

    Software Engineer Intern: Open Source Programs

    BlackBerry - Product Security Programs and Operations

    • Developed reports for open source compliance in Python to mitigate millions in legal, security or operational risk.
    • Created open source inventory summary, dependency inference and code diff reports used on every BlackBerry product.
    • Extended support for async and multi-threading, decreasing wait times by 95% and saving 30 mins per day for analysts
  4. September 2023 - April 2024

    Vice President: External

    UBC Computer Science Student Society

    • Heading operations to support 10+ tech industry projects partnering with 40+ companies for 3,000 students.
    • Managing and leading 35 devs in 5 teams to develop management systems for non profits and research labs.
    • Negotiated event partnerships with external entities including Google, totalling over $15k and 1,000 participants.
    • Directed a job fair for 30 companies amidst storms and transit strikes, leading outreach, communications and negotiations.
    • Developed webpages on the organization website viewed 2000 times in a month.
    • Designed social media posts reaching over 90,000 impressions in a month.
  5. May 2023 - Present

    Research Intern: Machine Learning

    BC Cancer Foundation - Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centres

    • Designed Python ML pipelines, tracking 700 cells dispensing per min then linking their physical and genetic cell features.
    • Combined bayesian, computer vision and deep learning models to track cells with 0.73 multi-object tracking accuracy.
    • Accelerated image labeling from months to minutes via motion-prompted image foundational models on HPCs.
    • Reduced segmentation error rate by 50% with circular region proposals and data augmentation of Mask R-CNN with PyTorch.
  6. January 2022 - August 2022

    Software Engineer Intern: Cloud & Wire Protocol

    insightsoftware - Simba Technologies

    • Upgraded the company’s first SQL ODBC drivers in C++ to support ARM64, enabling Apple’s 10+% PC market share.
    • Integrated 7 data types and 3 auth methods for Redshift Serverless, tested over AWS, Docker, Tableau and PowerBI.
    • Optimized PostgreSQL driver speed by 10% and memory use by 40% by re-developing parsing to use ANTLR over regex.
  7. June 2021 - January 2023

    Course Lead: Software Engineering

    UBC Computer Science & edX MicroMasters

    • Led delivery of UBC's Software Engineering MicroMasters program consisting of over 188,700 students.
    • Coordinated sprints, code reviews and deadlines for various full-stack projects in Racket and TypeScript.
    • Maintained course repository, performed end-to-end testing and code reviews.
  8. May 2021 - August 2021

    Research Intern: Machine Learning

    PROOF Centre for Excellence & St Paul's Hospital - Centre for Heart Lung Innovation

    • Researched ML models in Python to predict immunity factors of 700 infants for country vaccine policies, winning 2 awards.
    • Developed an AI model service with Python on AWS with support for big data regression, clustering and data mining.
    • Designed a React frontend to visualize multi-modal clustering on graphs to highlight 1,000 relevant biological mechanisms.
    • Showcased results at 4 research conferences (1 international) to biologists.
  9. September 2020 - Present

    Senior Teaching Assistant

    UBC Computer Science

    • Led programming labs and assessment for Software Engineering, Stats Models and Algorithms in R and Racket.
    • Developed all assignment autograding in the Stats Models course for complex data and outputs from ML algorithms.
    • Coordinated lecture and lab supervision tasks, providing software design feedback and ensuring other TAs provide accurate work.
    • Awarded Science Undergraduate Society Peer Helper Award for outstanding service and impact on peers.
  10. June 2018 - August 2020

    Warrant Officer 1st Class: Fitness & Sports

    Department of National Defence - Cadets Canada

    • Supervised, mentored, and developed 500 course cadets and staff cadets in leadership.
    • Ranked as one of the top 13 cadets in terms of leadership and instruction during regional staff placements.
    • Nominated as the best staff cadet in 2019.
    • Planned, refereed and led 18 weeks of sports, games and fitness training lessons.
    • Organized and led sports tabloid event for over 1000 cadets as a competition to build morale.
    • Commanded and coordinated 100 cadets as a unit on parade as Company Sergeant Major.

Want to chat?

I am open to mentorship, video content creation, or collaborating on technical ventures.

Reach out on LinkedIn or over Email on the navbar.