Toronto, Canada

Thanosan Prathifkumar

Engineer based in Toronto, building at the intersection of machine learning and full-stack product. Heading to Caltech this fall.

Previously at RBC and Triage. Now researching at Dartmouth, Toronto, and Waterloo.

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Career

Experience

  1. Software Engineer, GenAI Team · Royal Bank of Canada

    Jan 2026Present

    Toronto, Canada

    • Working on LLM optimization with RBC's GenAI team, improving inference performance for production language models
  2. Software Engineer · Royal Bank of Canada

    Jul 2025Aug 2025

    Toronto, Canada

    • Automated ATM service restarts across 40+ servers in RBC Caribbean with Python, replacing manual processes
    • Reduced downtime by 20% via self-service ticket-based tooling and saved 27 developer-hours per month
  3. Research Intern · Dartmouth College

    Jun 2025Present

    Remote

    • Designed a Bayesian neural network in Python for spatial transcriptomic uncertainty quantification
    • Ran large-scale experiments on Dartmouth's HPC cluster; will present this work at AACR 2026 in San Diego
  4. Research Assistant · University of Toronto

    Sep 2024Present

    Toronto, Canada

    • Modeling radiative transfer in protoplanetary disks to study planet-forming environments
    • Contributing to Astraeus, a research project on black hole imaging and dynamics
  5. Machine Learning Engineer · Triage

    Apr 2024Dec 2024

    Toronto, Canada

    • Built a production RAG pipeline using LangChain and ChromaDB, ingesting 10k+ medical documents to power a clinical LLM
    • Scraped and cleaned large-scale medical data, managing datasets with Databricks and SQL
    • Iterated quickly with the CEO and CTO, driving measurable improvements in diagnostic response quality
  6. Research Intern · University of Waterloo

    Mar 2023Present

    Waterloo, Canada

    • Ran 500+ experiments via the Anthropic API studying SWE-Bench-Verified benchmark leakage on Claude Sonnet models
    • First-authored and published a research paper based on the experimental findings

Research

Research & Publications

  • Publication· December 22, 2025

    Does SWE-Bench-Verified Test Agent Ability or Model Memory?

    University of Waterloo · First Author, with Noble Saji Mathews and Meiyappan Nagappan

    500+ experiments via the Anthropic API asking whether SWE-Bench-Verified scores reflect real coding-agent ability or memorized training data. Finds substantial overlap between benchmark tasks and model pretraining corpora, which complicates using the benchmark to compare agent capability.

    Read the paper
  • Abstract· April 3, 2026

    Quantifying Uncertainty in Virtual Spatial Transcriptomics Using Bayesian Neural Networks

    Dartmouth College · AACR Annual Meeting 2026, San Diego (Abstract 4189)

    A Bayesian neural network that predicts gene expression from H&E tissue images and separates epistemic from aleatoric uncertainty across 991 genes and ~290k tissue spots. Metabolic and cell-cycle pathways turn out to be the most reliably inferred from morphology alone.

    Read the abstract