Waterloo
to San Francisco
Your Cali or bust era starts now. Skip the Toronto backup plan and come build the future in SF.
You Didn't Grind to Play It Safe
You survived CS 246 and WaterlooWorks. You shipped side projects at 3am in DC. Now stop settling for co-ops and come build something real.
Better Than Another Big Tech Co-op
Skip the WaterlooWorks lottery. These are the roles your classmates who ended up at OpenAI and Scale wish they'd found sooner.
3–6 month placements
Internships
Forget writing internal tools nobody uses. Ship real AI products to production, build your SF network during co-op, and come back to campus with stories worth telling.
Founding engineer roles
Full-Time
You've done 4+ co-ops and can out-engineer most senior devs. Join as a founding engineer with real equity — not another L3 offer with a signing bonus that vests in 4 years.
From DC Library to SF Office
Sign Up
Sign in with your Waterloo email and we'll pull in your co-op history, side projects, and GitHub.
Complete Challenges
Solve the same technical problems SF founders use to hire. Think of it as your co-op interview, but for startups.
Get Matched
We match you directly with AI startups looking for Waterloo engineers. No mass applying on LinkedIn.
Land Your Role
Interview, get your offer, and swap the ION train for BART. We'll help with visa logistics too.
Harder Than a CS 341 Final
These are the actual technical challenges SF founders use to hire. If you can survive Waterloo's curriculum, you can crush these.
Multimodal Video Analysis
Build a system that enables users to chat with videos, cite videos, and search videos using natural language queries
Pentagram: Realtime Image Diffusion
Build a real-time image diffusion system using Modal, React, and Next.js
Code Evaluator
Build an AI code evaluator that can analyze code and provide feedback on how to improve it
Your Path to an O-1 Visa
You're a Waterloo engineer with co-ops, side projects, and open-source contributions. You probably already qualify for an O-1 visa, we'll show you exactly how.
Readiness Score
We score your GitHub repos, co-op history, and side projects against the 10 USCIS criteria. Most Waterloo students score higher than they expect.
Criteria Mapping
Your hackathon wins, open-source PRs, and co-op work already count. See which criteria you've met and what gaps to close before graduation.
Action Plan
A term-by-term plan you can start now — publish a paper, judge a hackathon, get a recommendation letter — all before you graduate.
| O-1 | H-1B | TN | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual Cap | No cap | 85,000 (lottery) | No cap |
| Selection | Merit-based | Lottery + Bachelor's | Canada/Mexico only |
| Green Card | Dual intent | Dual intent | Must prove non-immigrant intent |
YYZ → SFO · 4,200 km
You didn't pick
the hardest school in Canada
to play it safe
From E7 lecture halls to SF startups. The same drive that got you into Waterloo is what SF founders are looking for.
Your Co-op Was
the Warm-Up
Waterloo engineers are already at OpenAI, Scale, Anthropic, and hundreds of SF startups. The only question is whether you're next.
