A recent Capital Region BOCES student recently presented his knowledge and skills at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in New York City.
William Kruk is a 2022 graduate of the Game Design and Implementation program who now works as a software engineer for Lynkwell. The Schenectady-based company is described as “a provider and aggregator of electric vehicle charging station and infrastructure solutions, supporting some of the largest charging networks in North America.”
Kruk was part of a team of about 10 Lynkwell experts that led a discussion on their Agentic Integration system.
“It’s crazy to me that there are professionals at big companies like Amazon that want to work with me and my team despite my lack of traditional post-secondary education,” said Kruk, who attended BOCES from Schalmont.
Kruk was accepted into the RIT Game Design and Development program after leaving BOCES but opted to put his skills to work after successfully completing his first semester at the college. He returned to Livingston Energy Group, where he had worked as a student at BOCES, and started as a paid intern working with a team of developers supporting the ChargePort EV Charging mobile application that is utilized by thousands of drivers across the country. Livingston Energy Group is a division of Lynkwell.
Kruk said the Agentic Integration system he and his fellow developers are working on is “a new cutting-edge system where we as developers can manually write code-based tools, or agents, that an AI can utilize. For example, if a user asked for the weather, instead of the AI generating something that sounds like what the weather could be, we can write a tool that finds the current weather, and then when the AI needs to find weather information, it can use our agent to get accurate information.”
“This was an awesome experience for William and a testament to his hard work and diligence” said James Haas, a Work-based Learning Coordinator at Capital Region BOCES.
Capital Region BOCES Managing Program Coordinator-Business & Community Partnerships Nancy Liddle praised Kruk for “combining his hard work and drive with a solid educational foundation formed at Schalmont and Capital Region BOCES.”
Asked to reflect on working on such a high-tech platform just three years after graduating from BOCES, Kruk said “it is insane to me how much I’ve developed.”
“In the relatively small timeframe I’ve been at Lynkwell, I have received the title of Software Engineer II, helped to deploy multiple websites and phone apps, and am now on a team working with AWS with the bleeding edge of AI technology while most of my friends are still in college.”
Kruk said his education at BOCES set the stage for his ascension into the high-tech world.
“BOCES pressed the importance of figuring things out; of trying to work at things until a solution is found, which I believe has been my strongest guiding factor to my success,” Kruk said.
“A career and technical education is a great experience to have. Not only does it give you the fundamentals to start a career, but it instills the values to keep pushing those boundaries,” he added.