Very few can claim to have matriculated at 15, and achieved an honours qualification and been headhunted by Amazon before their 21st birthday, but Kialan Pillay is one such anomaly.
Later this year, he will be studying for his master’s in advanced computer science at the University of Oxford.
Pillay is a software engineer working on Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon’s flagship cloud service — a tool used by millions across the globe for their computing resource requirements.
Pillay’s passion is artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), two areas he believes can have vast and impactful applications in almost all areas of society. In a low-resource context such as South Africa, cloud technologies combined with AI and ML can create high-impact, scalable solutions that will drastically change the lives of the communities in which they are deployed.
“Take every chance that comes your way — with both hands.”