Experience

Research Experience

• Visiting Researcher

  KIXLAB (KAIST Interaction Lab) · Remote · Advised by Prof. Juho Kim · Jun 2026 - Aug 2026
  • Investigated when a graph-structured workflow representation helps a user more than a plain written answer, and which of its properties does the work.
  • Assembled a nineteen-paper related-work library and coded nine node-link systems against a common grid, finding that incremental re-execution depends on standing-dependency edges plus a cache rather than on graph structure as such.
  • Built Workflow Editor, a dual-view research prototype pairing an agent's written report with the provenance graph that produced it, in which every figure is validated against the computation that emitted it before the report renders.

• Research Assistant

  Colombo HCI Lab, University of Colombo School of Computing · Colombo · Advised by Dr. Dilrukshi Gamage · Mar 2025 - Present
  • Co-authoring research on culturally-contextualised media-literacy interventions for AI-generated content in Global South settings.
  • Built the annotation interface and data-collection pipeline for a South Asian deepfake detection model, in an international collaboration spanning Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and Switzerland.

• Community Researcher

  Cohere For AI · Remote · Advised by Sara Hooker · Mar 2023 - Apr 2024
  • Built the web platform used to collect multilingual human annotations for the Aya instruction-tuning dataset (ACL 2024) — SSO, annotation workflow, analytics, RTL support.

• Research Assistant

  University of Colombo School of Computing · Colombo · Advised by Dr. Noel Fernando · May 2021 - Dec 2024
  • Applied classical and deep time-series models to forecast long-horizon municipal solid-waste generation in Sri Lankan cities; published in IEEE Access.

• Research Intern

  University of Colombo School of Computing · Colombo · Advised by Dr. Nalin Ranasinghe · Jul 2018 - Jan 2019
  • Prototyped a privacy-preserving training layer over TensorFlow enabling model fitting on homomorphically encrypted tensors across a distributed worker network.
  • Presented the work as a poster at the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS) Exhibition, Dec. 2018.

Professional Experience

• Lead ML Engineer

  ParadigmAI · Colombo · Aug 2023 - Present
  • Built an LLM-backed platform that predicts a respondent's survey answers from their prior response history.
  • Designed the translation backend for a low-code system compiling graph-structured workflows into executable code.
  • Engineered a multi-transport LLM gateway (REST/gRPC) with key rotation, vendor fallback (OpenAI/Anthropic), and request-level tracing, serving production traffic peaking at 500K requests/day.
  • Implemented a Celery-on-SQS transcript evaluation service with Pydantic-enforced response schemas, streamed scoring via an internal OpenAI proxy, and Postgres-backed result sync with automated feedback generation.
  • Built LLMOps tooling: an async Celery/SQS evaluation service and a Streamlit analytics suite surfacing cost, latency, and health metrics across LLM workloads.
  • Architected an AI-powered code evaluation platform ingesting GitHub repositories for automated review.

• Senior Data Science Engineer

  WSO2 · Colombo · Nov 2021 - Aug 2023
  • Trained and deployed classification, regression, and clustering models driving product adoption and user-engagement metrics.
  • Built internal analytics dashboards exposing model performance, A/B test outcomes, and business KPIs.
  • Standardized team practice for experiment tracking, model versioning, and reproducible evaluation pipelines.

• Data Science Engineer

  WSO2 · Colombo · Apr 2021 - Oct 2021
  • Analyzed product-usage telemetry and built predictive models to surface adoption trends; scoped ML opportunities with product and engineering stakeholders.
  • Scoped ML opportunities with product and engineering stakeholders and presented findings to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Software Engineer - IAM Team

  WSO2 · Colombo · Mar 2020 - Mar 2021
  • Shipped features into WSO2 Identity Server on the product-development track and served on the patch-services team triaging and backporting fixes across supported customer releases.
  • Served on the patch (services) team triaging and backporting security and functional fixes across supported customer releases.

• Student Developer

  CERN-HSF - Google Summer of Code · Remote · May 2018 - Aug 2018
  • Contributed to Phoenix, the next-gen Vue.js web UI for ownCloud and CERNBox (CERN's cloud-storage platform serving 13K+ users over 2.5 PB), with offline-capable browser operation via service-worker caching and a Go-based local WebDAV bridge.
  • Added offline-capable browser operation: service-worker metadata caching, offline-mode detection with reconciliation on reconnect, and a Go-based local WebDAV bridge integrating the desktop sync client to redirect file I/O while disconnected.

• Software Developer

  Language Matters · Sri Lanka · Advised by Dr. Leonie Solomons · Jan 2018 - Mar 2020
  • Developed TessTA, a production OCR system for Sinhala: fine-tuned the Tesseract engine on a hand-curated Sinhala corpus and diagnosed and resolved script-specific failure modes (character decomposition, ligature segmentation, diacritic attachment) to lift recognition accuracy on low-resource Sinhala text.

• Software Developer

  Dreamteam IT Solutions · Sri Lanka · Advised by Dr. Gihan Kuruppu · Feb 2016 - Jan 2017
  • Built an instrumented Smart Glove prototype (FSR-400 pressure array + Arduino) capturing hand pressure distribution and acceleration to model cricket batting grip dynamics.
  • Deployed an embedded OpenCV pipeline on Raspberry Pi detecting knots in yarn threads on industrial glove-weaving machines, eliminating hundreds of needle breakages per day and reducing manual inspection.
  • Built a conveyor-line image-processing system identifying common textile-glove defects in-flow and triggering automated reject handling without operator intervention.

• Course Instructor

  Dreamteam IT Solutions · Sri Lanka · Jan 2016 - Jun 2016
  • Delivered Java preparation sessions for the Oracle Certified Java Programmer (OCJP, Java SE 6) certification, covering the full certification syllabus.
  • Taught an introductory robotics course centered on line-following robots, covering sensor calibration, simple control loops, and microcontroller programming.