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Dulini Mendis
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Canva

Engineering Manager · May 2026 – Nov 2026

I worked on AI design generation at Canva, then joined a platform team supporting Canva AI. As Engineering Manager I led a team of seven backend and ML engineers. I led the work to cut the cost of generating designs and to move design generation from fixed pipelines to agent tools, and I built tools like one-click bug reports to make everyday work easier. Along the way I set up a few small AI automations for the team: a daily round-up, slides for regular meetings, and Jira updates for weekly reporting.

What I worked on

Build

Cost reduction

Halving the cost of Liberation, one of the ways Canva AI makes designs, by switching it to cheaper models and testing with real users that the designs were still good.

Build

One-click bug reports

A way for Canva staff to report a Canva AI bug with one click and a short description, with the traces and everything else needed to fix it captured automatically.

Leadership

From pipelines to agent tools

Moving Canva's design generation from fixed pipelines to tools an AI agent can call, and retiring old pipelines without disrupting the Canva AI launches happening at the same time.