Career Paths¶

A map from the path you're curious about to what UofA offers for it: the courses, the research groups and clubs, and the Edmonton employers in that space. What each job involves day to day is a search away; this page is about where to find it here.

Course links go to the wiki's course pages; check each one's prerequisites and recent terms before planning around it. Employers come from the verified Edmonton employer directory; "none verified" means we couldn't confirm local student hiring, not that nobody hires.

Last verified: October 2026.

Software Engineering¶


Courses	201, 291, 301, 401, 402, 404, 325, 416. The Software Practice Option bundles most of these with a mandatory SIP placement (Program Overview).
Research	Software engineering and programming languages
Clubs	Ada's Team's open-source dev team; hackathons (HackED, HackED Beta) (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	Jobber, Fleetworthy, Alberta Motor Association, ATB Financial, City of Edmonton, Government of Alberta

Machine Learning and AI¶


Courses	261, 267, 365, 366, 466, 467, 461, 463, 469, 382. The AI Option guarantees the core sequence (Program Overview).
Research	Reinforcement learning, ML and AI, NLP; Amii and RLAI's summer Tea Time Talks
Clubs	UAIS, including its SillyCon Valley hackathon (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	AltaML, Huawei Canada (Edmonton research team), Amii (grad-student accelerator)

Systems and Infrastructure¶


Courses	229, 379, 313, 415, 429, 481, 382, 393
Research	Systems, compilers and networks
Clubs	Engineering design teams (ARVP, AlbertaSat, UAARG) for embedded and autonomy software (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	TELUS (Engineering and Technology co-op), Fleetworthy (platform roles), EPCOR (IT summer students)

Security¶


Courses	333, 331, plus 229, 313 and 379 for the low-level background
Research	Privacy and security
Clubs	CHADS: workshops, CTFs, and its own CTF, HTCOTB (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	None verified with student security roles. Look at the banks, utilities and governments in the directory, and federal roles through FSWEP.

Games¶


Courses	250, 256, 350, 355, 455, 307, 411
Research	Heuristic search and games, including procedural content generation
Clubs	The Games Den; Alberta Game Jam (September) and Global Game Jam Edmonton (January) (events calendar)
Edmonton employers	BioWare and Beamdog (studios; no student postings found), Huawei Canada (posted a game engine systems intern role in 2026)

Graphics, Vision and Robotics¶


Courses	206, 328, 428, 411, 307, 414, 312, 412, 382
Research	Vision, graphics, multimedia and robotics
Clubs	ARVP, AlbertaSat, UAARG (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	None verified with student roles in this area; the game studios and Huawei Canada are the closest fits.

Data¶


Courses	191 or 195, 200, 291, 361, 393, 267, 466, 340
Research	Databases and data mining
Clubs	UAIS (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	ATB Financial (posted a Technology and Data student role), AltaML, Government of Alberta

Research and Grad School¶


Courses	Honors, then 399 or 499 individual study with a professor; 304 and 474 if you lean theoretical
Research	Research Areas and Groups, Getting Into Research (USRA and URI funding), Grad School
Clubs	UAIS researcher talks; UAPSPC for algorithms-minded students (Clubs)
Edmonton employers	Amii, Huawei Canada (co-op researcher roles), and the university itself (paid summer research)

Know a course, group or Edmonton employer that belongs on this map? Open a correction with a source.