Jonathan is a Computer Science student from the University of Waterloo. He didn’t expect to find a co-op outside of North America.

"A co-op in Japan is very hard to come by, especially for Waterloo students.”

He jumped on the opportunity and he’s wrapping up his four-month co-op with us.

He made agents adapt at real time.

Jonathan spent his first month and a half working on a custom use case flow.

Before this, if you wanted an AI agent to handle a request with multiple possible outcomes, you had to build separate paths for each scenario. For example, if someone wants to change their shipping address for an order, they’ll have to first go through verification. If they verify successfully, that’s one path. If they fail verification, that’s another path. These scenarios and paths add up very quickly.

Jonathan’s team worked on simplifying that.

Now, a single use case can branch depending on how the conversation unfolds. It moves forward when things go smoothly, or takes a different path when they don’t.

"If a customer wants an AI agent to do something, then after that, depending on what the user says, branch off into different trajectories, end the conversation if the task is finished, verify this if the customer didn't speak correctly. I was architecting all that branching logic. Once it was deployed, I felt very satisfied."

Fast paced. Yes. But fast doesn’t mean sloppy.

Jurin AI moves fast.Coming from internships where things moved slower and repos were smaller, Jonathan had to get up to speed quickly just to contribute.

The team also experiments constantly. He remembers switching to a new tool just a week or two after joining, while still in the middle of a project.

“If you’re a really good engineer, you can learn how to manage the stress. As your work increases, if you manage your time correctly, you can actually accommodate more work if you adjust your schedule.”

A friend at another co-op told him that startups typically have minimal review process with production breaking every day (it’s the second time we’re hearing this from our interns now). For a lot of engineers, that’s just accepted as “startup life”.

But here, even as the pace increases, engineers still own their PRs and things get thoroughly tested before they go live.

"A friend from SF told me his company's review process is almost nonexistent, and that leads to production crashing almost every day. Even though Jurin moves really fast, the review process is still thorough. A thorough review process plus a fast-paced environment, I think that's the perfect combination."

Just hop on a call… what?

One culture Jonathan noticed, and did not expect, is how the team defaults to calls.

"I really like the culture of just hopping on a call. It's a much more efficient way of doing things than texting, you can speak way faster than you type."

There’s a simple rule behind it. If something takes less than a minute to write, send a message. If you know it’s going to be a series of messages and you might end up wasting an hour on back-and forth, just call. Texting would be a waste of resource for both parties.

The people aren’t transactional.

Jonathan also noticed the difference in how people treat each other.

"Beyond technical ability, when you have people that you can actually bond with and actually enjoy spending time with, that elevates your productivity and makes you want to work for the company more. At the companies I was at before, it was much more transactional."

Now he’s looking beyond North America.

Jonathan always planned to work in AI. That didn’t change. But after four months in Tokyo, Jonathan is now looking more closely at opportunities in Asia.
‍

The way Rise cares about the company really spreads to the team. It’s rare to see a founder who genuinely believes in what they’re building. A lot don’t. That’s something I’ll look for going forward.

We hire from the University of Waterloo every term. Look out for Jurin AI on WaterlooWorks if you're interested!
‍
For more information, visit www.jurin.ai.