Working in Big Tech or Tech Consulting: A Look at the different career paths and how you can leverage your degree

In 2021 Canada's technology ecosystem grew by its largest amount. As Big Tech and Big Tech Consulting continue to grow in Canada, many companies will be looking for new talent. Individuals from Meta and PwC (Canada) will be joining S2BN-Kingston to discuss what it is like working with in big tech and tech consulting, discuss potential positions that exist within the company, and how a graduate degree can help you obtain a career in Big Tech. 

Sajith (Saj) Nair is a Partner at PwC Canada and leads their National Cybersecurity, Privacy & Financial Crime practice, which includes practitioners specialized in cybersecurity, privacy, fraud, anti-money laundering, sanctions, forensics and crisis management. He is also the Americas Cybersecurity & Privacy leader and part of PwC’s Global Cybersecurity & Privacy Leadership.Saj has international experience working with organizations in North America, Australia, Asia and Europe. He has helped numerous organizations to transform and optimize their cybersecurity, privacy and financial crime programs, and respond and recover from crises.

Kalia Akkad is a Product Data Scientist at Meta, supporting the engineering team behind video/audio calls on Messenger and Instagram with platform quality. She began her career as a management consultant at PwC where she acquired fundamental consulting and problem solving skills across a variety of domains, including procurement, technology transformations and business analytics. She then transitioned to Lever (a tech startup) as an analytics consultant where she enabled customers with data analysis tools and empowered them to make data-informed decisions. Kalia holds a Chemical Engineering and Management degree from McMaster University. She loves Canadian winters (no sarcasm here!) and enjoys some casual skating and snowboarding. In the summertime, she spends her time outdoors biking, hiking or camping as much as possible.