Internship Highlights: Thiru Deepak with Canary Technologies

This post is part of our “Intern of the Week” highlight series written by Kelsie Luong, Class of 2028. For this spotlight, we spoke with Thiru Deepak (Class of 2026), who is interning with Canary Technologies.

What is your internship and what do you usually do there?

• I'm interning at Canary Technologies, which is a hospitality tech company. Day to day I'm basically building stuff, writing code, breaking it, fixing it. A lot of Python and TypeScript. I spend a good chunk of time working on AI agents and figuring out how to make them actually talk to each other in a way that doesn't fall apart when you give it a weird input.

What is the best, or most fun thing you’ve done at your internship?

• Honestly the facial recognition part. I know that sounds kind of creepy when I say it out loud, but the idea that I wrote code that can look at a face in a video clip, scan someone's social media, find who that person is, and auto-tag them in a post... I sat back after it worked the first time and was like, okay that's actually insane. It felt less like coding and more like building something out of a sci-fi movie. The part where it matched the company logo too. I didn't expect that to work as clean as it did.

What is your internship project?

• So, I'm building a full AI-powered video editing system, the kind where you drop in raw footage, type something like "make this a 30 second Reel with upbeat music and captions," and the AI just... does it. Trims, transitions, captions, music sync, visual effects, all of it. And then it uploads straight to whatever platform you pick, tags the people in the video, tags any logos it recognizes. I chose it because I'd been doing mostly web app stuff and I wanted to push into something I genuinely didn't know how to do yet. Full-stack, AI agents, machine learning foundations... I needed to actually be uncomfortable for a while. And I was. For a while. Still kind of am, if I'm being honest.

What is a challenge you faced from your internship?

• The hardest part was wrapping my head around how AI agents are supposed to coordinate. Like, it's not just "call this function, get a result." You're basically writing a whole system where different agents have different jobs, and they have to hand off information to each other without things going sideways. I spent way too long one week just staring at an error that turned out to be the agents basically talking past each other. Felt like group project problems but the group members are all code. Once I got it, though, something clicked about how AI actually works at a systems level that no YouTube video had ever gotten through to me before.

How has this internship, along with all of your internships at Big Picture, helped or changed your career vision and goals overtime?

• When I started at Big Picture I had this vague idea of "I want to work in tech." That's it. Very helpful, very specific. Over time, and especially with this internship, it got way sharper. I care about the bridge between what a person intends and what a machine does. That sounds abstract but it's the same thing whether I'm prompting an AI to edit a video or, eventually, thinking about bionic limbs in biotech. The core problem is the same: how do you take something messy and human and get a machine to understand it cleanly. Big Picture gave me enough real projects that I stopped thinking about "getting a job at a tech company" and started thinking about what problem I actually want to spend my life on. That shift is kind of everything.