Alistair Kennedy
Staff Software Engineer at SoundHound AI
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlistair Kennedy is a Staff Software Engineer and AI-focused leader based in Toronto with 14 years of experience building production-grade, agentic systems at SoundHound AI. He blends deep academic roots—a PhD and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Ottawa—with long-standing engineering and management roles, moving from hands-on staff engineering to senior engineering management and back to technical leadership. His work emphasizes taking research-grade ideas into reliable, scalable production systems for conversational and voice AI, reflecting a rare mix of neuroscience-adjacent postdoctoral research and applied software engineering. Comfortable across the full stack, Alistair is known for bridging research, product, and platform teams to deliver pragmatic solutions under real-world constraints. Colleagues value him for rigorous problem decomposition and for keeping systems maintainable as they scale in high-throughput, latency-sensitive domains.
14 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors of Computer Science Computer Science, Bachelors of Computer Science Computer Science at Dalhousie UniversityPhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of OttawaGithub contributions (2)
alistairk/GeneralizedTermSemantics
Aug 2011 - Mar 2013
Contributions:90 commits in 1 year 6 months
cfournie/uottawa.nlp.hackreduce
Aug 2011 - Aug 2011
Contributions:12 commits in 5 days
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