Part-time SWE at Grit Financial Inc.

Saarang Anand

Computer science student @ SFU and software engineer with experience across the full stack. Passionate about writing clean, efficient software.

Explore My Work 👋Let's Connect

Selected Work

Featured Projects

Some of the things I've worked on.

SFU Tangent Lab•2026

SpeakSwarm

Built the first system to generate and execute co-speech gestures on a non-humanoid robot swarm
Achieved 92.5% keyword coverage across 40 concepts in evaluation
Co-authored a full paper submitted to ACM UIST 2026 and ACM CHI 2027

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ExploreCSR•2025

netAI

Built a pipeline that translates natural language into P4_16 network configs
Implemented compiler error feedback to the LLM for retry
Verified generated programs via p4c in Docker and persisted results to PostgreSQL

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CMPT 419•2024

Surgical VQA Pipeline

Built a pipeline answering questions from trauma simulation videos
Benchmarked 3 models across zero-shot configs using Accuracy & F1-score
Fine-tuned CLIP and ViLT via cross-entropy classification

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CMPT 276•2024

Vibe

Led a team of 5 to develop a fully-functional social media music platform
Built with Java and PostgreSQL, containerized with Docker
Integrated MusicBrainz and Spotify APIs for user-matching

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The Journey So Far

Experience

Some of the teams I've been part of.

2024 - Present

Grit Financial Inc.

Software Developer
Part-time · Sep 2026 - Present
Software Developer Intern
Summers 2024 - 2026

Architected an end-to-end Playwright test automation platform, cutting manual regression time by 80% across 6 core workflows
Diagnose production issues on the Earned-Wage Access product and turn recurring ones into backend fixes and product improvements
Migrated hard-coded legacy data to cloud storage, reducing technical debt and improving security
Automated string localization for an application rebrand with scripts that streamlined API integration

Sep 2025 - Present

Tangent Lab @ SFU

Research Lead
Jan 2026 - Present
Research Assistant
Sep - Dec 2025

Led a team of 3 through the design and development of SpeakSwarm
Collected in-person system evaluation data and presented the work at a research symposium
Led development of swarm robot interactions for emotion regulation

Sep 2024 - May 2025

Simon Fraser University

Research Assistant

Collaborated with undergraduate researchers on LLM-driven Intent-Based Networking, the research behind netAI
Prototyped experiments relating networking metrics to QoE for haptic data
Designed and presented a research poster at an on-campus conference

Google Research certificate

Leadership & Community

Jan 2023 - Sep 2026

~500 volunteer hours

Developers & Systems Club

Executive Director

Hosted a 2-hour game development workshop attended by 30+ students
Built Python and Kotlin libraries used in club programming competitions
Led community engagement and programming content creation
Owned the club's finances, including bookkeeping and transaction tracking

Watch my workshop

Jan 2023 - May 2025

~400 volunteer hours

Google Developer Student Club

Executive

Organized technical events and workshops on Google technologies for 100+ students
Developed interactive workshop content to improve attendee learning
Planned monthly events with a team of 6 executives, from logistics to outreach

Core Team certificate

A little background