Skip to content
Dulini Mendis

Dulini Mendis

I build products and the teams that ship them.

I lead engineering teams and still build things myself. I've worked on clinical data tools and AI products, and I care about the craft and the people doing it.

See my workHow I leadDownload CV
  1. Started work in Sri Lanka, as an engineer at Virtusa, 2011 to 2013.
  2. Moved to Melbourne in 2014 for a PhD in computational neuroscience at the University of Melbourne.
  3. Founding engineer at Seer Medical, 2017 to 2024, growing with the company to Senior Engineering Manager.
  4. Frontend tech lead at Leonardo.Ai, 2024 to 2026.
  5. Engineering manager at Canva, 2026.
Portrait of Dulini Mendis

Solving problems that truly make a difference, supporting the growth of others and getting things into the hands of users is what motivates me the most.

I started as a founding software engineer at Seer Medical, a regulated medtech company that ran on software I built or led. From there I became tech lead at Leonardo.Ai and, most recently, Engineering Manager for Canva's Design Generation Platform, which supports the LLM pipelines behind Canva AI. Before all that, I did a PhD in computational neuroscience at the University of Melbourne.

Builder

I still build things.

I stay close to the code. It's hard to lead engineers well once you've stopped building yourself.

Screens full of live data

Making dense data easy to read and quick to use, like days of EEG lined up with video.

Seer Data Viewer →

AI products people enjoy

Flow State and Blueprints turn powerful image models into tools you can pick up without learning prompt tricks.

Flow State and Blueprints →

Making AI cheaper to run

At Canva I halved the cost of one of Canva AI's ways of making designs by moving it to cheaper models, without hurting design quality.

Canva cost reduction →

Leader

Teams that own their work and still log off on time.

I've led engineering teams at Seer Medical, Leonardo.ai and Canva. Instead of handing out tickets, I give each part of the work an owner, and spend my time coaching.

11

reports at Seer, across a product team and two platform teams

7

backend and ML engineers led at Canva

4

engineers led at Leonardo.ai

2

engineers promoted from mid-level to senior

People own the work

Every part of a feature has a champion who runs it from kickoff to launch, and keeps looking after it once it's live.

Time to switch off

At Leonardo, I took a team used to burnout and last-minute fixes and got it shipping high-quality work on time, without the late nights.

Room to grow

I hired the whole Seer-Clinic team, and promoted two engineers from mid-level to senior, one at Seer and one at Leonardo. I grew the same way, promoted three times at Seer from software engineer to senior engineering manager.

“One of her strengths was helping the team turn ambiguous work into clear next steps. … Dulini would [be] an asset to any team looking for an engineering manager who combines technical understanding with practical delivery leadership and care for the people doing the work.”

Madeline Long, Backend Software Engineer, Canva. Reported to me directly.

“Dulini has been an excellent mentor who has challenged me to become the best version of myself, always in a supportive and constructive manner. … She loves coding so much that she scored the highest in our Hackathon coding challenge.”

Angie Hentri, Software Engineer, Seer Medical. Reported to me directly.
How I led Seer's clinic and platform teams →How I built the team at Leonardo.ai →

Selected work

Three companies, and what I did at each.

Seer Medical

Founding engineer, then leader of the clinic and platform teams, at the company that moved epilepsy monitoring from hospital to home.

Data ViewerLive monitoringLeading clinic and platform teams

Leonardo.ai

I led the frontend for Flow State and Blueprints, two of Leonardo's biggest AI features, and grew the team behind them.

Flow StateBlueprintsBuilding the team

Canva

I led seven backend and ML engineers on the platform behind Canva AI, and halved the cost of one of its design generation methods.

Cost reductionFrom pipelines to agent toolsOne-click bug reports

Experience

Where I've worked.

  1. Canva

    Engineering Manager

    May 2026 – Nov 2026

    Cutting AI costs, agent tools and internal tools

  2. Leonardo.ai

    Frontend Tech Lead

    Oct 2024 – May 2026

    Flow State, Blueprints and building the team

  3. Seer Medical

    Founding engineer to Senior Engineering Manager

    Jul 2017 – Oct 2024

    Data Viewer, live monitoring and clinic tools

  4. Outcome.Life

    Web Developer (part-time)

    Mar 2017 – Jun 2017

    A React and GraphQL product that matched interns with organisations offering internships

  5. IBM

    Research Intern

    Jun 2016 – Oct 2016

    Brain-computer interfaces from EEG with deep learning, and reading the political leaning of news articles with NLP

  6. University of Melbourne

    PhD (Engineering), computational neuroscience

    Jan 2014 – Sep 2017

    Brain cells grown on microelectrode arrays, with signal processing and machine learning to find patterns in their activity

  7. Virtusa

    Senior Engineer, Technology

    Dec 2011 – Jul 2013

    Hybrid and Android apps for a US startup, then a .NET web app for vehicle insurers

Contact

Let's build something good.

Based in Melbourne, Australia. Open to engineering and leadership roles.

Send me a message here, or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub. You can also download my CV.