Experience
Principal Engineer, Anuna Research
November 2025 - Present
Anuna Research is a software consultancy that brings novel technologies to bear on practical problems. At Anuna, I have:
- Built a significant fraction of a new digital government platform for BARMM, a newly-formed state in the Philippines. This has included: building an SSO provider (OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect) that allows citizens to sign in to and share their data with other government services; building systems for E2E-encrypted submission and management of medical expense reimbursement forms; AWS infrastructure design and CDK definitions to deploy the above; CI/CD integrations via GitLab for testing and deployment; improvements to the existing citizen-facing app Expo app (React Native).
- Contributed to the Rust implementation of a deontic defeasible logic language called Spindle, including providing advice on Lean 4 formalisation of core evaluator properties.
- Built components of an LLM agent orchestration platform, allowing LLM harnesses like Claude Code and Codex to autonomously go from ticket to merge request, communicating via Slack.
Senior Software Engineer, Grok Academy
August 2023 - October 2024
Grok Academy is a not-for-profit with the mission of making digital technologies education available to all Australian school students. While I was at Grok, this meant delivering our learning platform to over 300,000 active students and teachers at over 3,000 Australian schools. At Grok, I was:
- Responsible for the design and implementation of a new frontend architecture for authoring course content. My design was based on web standards (Web Components/Shadow DOM/CustomEvents) and allowed tech-savvy educators to build complex interactive components using any web technologies they liked, whilst also providing boilerplate components to expedite authoring where appropriate. This also involved technical leadership to bring other engineers along with the new design, and teaching educators to use the new tools.
- Part of producing a TV show where high school students used their STEM skills to solve real-world problems. My role was to take student concepts and quickly turn around camera-ready prototypes. Two such prototypes were a reaction testing game built using HTML Canvas, and a menu translation app prototyped in Figma with mock interactivity.
Senior Software Engineer, Mastt
May 2021 - August 2023
Mastt builds tools to make managing large construction projects more transparent, predictable, and accurate. Its core product helps manage cost, scheduling, and risk, on over $30bn worth of capital works projects. At Mastt, I was:
- One of the lead engineers on ‘Project Theseus’, incrementally replacing the original Ruby on Rails app with Go and Typescript. This led to improvements in user experience, reliability, data integrity, and speed - over 50x for some pages. The incremental rebuild also didn’t require a feature freeze as may have been needed for a ‘stop-the-world’ rebuild, allowing Mastt to continue adapting to customer and market needs.
- A mentor on backend development, functional programming, and effective use of strong static type systems in program design. This included helping our junior data scientist grow into our most valued backend engineer, and getting my team’s frontend engineer comfortable with TypeScript and functional React.
- Part of the group responsible for platform and system architecture. This included moving from ‘pet’ VMs to containers/Kubernetes and implementing continuous integration, getting our deployment process from hours to minutes.
Senior Software Engineer, PaidRight
July 2020 - April 2021
PaidRight helps companies ensure they are paying their employees correctly. Its core product is a bespoke programming system for representing pay legislation as code, which can then be applied to payroll data, identifying cases where employees weren’t paid according to the legislation. I was responsible for:
- Designing the PaidRight programming language, and implementing it as an interpreter and distributed job running system. This led to a speed-up of around 10x for user programs compared with the previous system.
- Sharing in the design and development of the browser-based code editor for the PaidRight language. This included features for rapid editing and catching common programmer errors, which led to faster development and debugging for users.
- Helping up-skill the PaidRight data team by running training sessions in Python, R, and Git, and laying foundations for building structured data processing pipelines. These tools let the team transition away from ad-hoc approaches, increasing throughput and decreasing error rates.
Software Engineer, CSIRO’s Data61
December 2015 - July 2020
Data61 is the digital and data science arm of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. At Data61, I worked on several projects in various capacities:
- Building a stream processing system for detecting physical damage to structures, using continuous data from IoT sensors. This required translating machine learning research algorithms into Scala, and creating a stream processing framework using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB.
- Mobile-first frontend work on an early version of RapidAim, a tool for informing agricultural workers about pest outbreaks in real time. I developed custom react components for a complex interactive timeline control, and a heat-map data visualisation built on top of Google Maps.
- Building tools for working with sensitive healthcare data, including de-identification of such data, and analysis over the de-identified data to assess disease risk in the sampled population.
Research Engineering Intern, University of Technology Sydney
January 2015 - June 2015
This role was a continuation of the capstone project work for my degree, building drone control software which incorporated computer vision and accelerometer/gyroscope data. Highlights included:
- Designing and implementing multithreaded control software in C++. This included use of OpenCV for object tracking via an on-board camera, and implementing control algorithms in Eigen, a linear algebra library.
- Integrating a small single-board computer (SBC) with a commercial drone, including designing custom electronics for communication between the SBC and the drone’s embedded controller.
Junior Design Engineer (Intern), Genesys Electronics Design
July 2014 - January 2015
Genesys is a boutique electronics engineering consultancy which provides design, manufacturing, and electrical compliance testing services. I was responsible for:
- Developing test suites for medical device firmware, for ensuring standards compliance.
- Embedded system design, including firmware development.
- Coordinating the manufacture of prototype devices and assemblies.
Inventor and Invention Analyst, Ioncorp
January 2013 - March 2014
Ioncorp provided services around invention. This included generating novel concepts for customers looking to establish IP in fields such as healthcare, energy, and information technology, as well as helping independent inventors understand the commercialisation prospects for their inventions. My work there involved:
- Inventing novel solutions to proposed problems.
- Validating solutions through research, engineering analysis, and proof-of-concept prototyping.
- Assessing the IP and market context around independent inventors’ work.
Education
The University of Technology Sydney
2009 - 2015
Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical & Mechatronic), Diploma in Engineering Practice
Skills
Languages
TypeScript/React, CSS, Rust, Haskell, SQL/Postgres, Python
Platforms
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Azure
General
Linux admin, networking, data modelling & relational schema design, embedded systems, LLM/AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Codex)
Areas of interest
Functional programming, type systems, design, software and system architecture
Talks & Publications
- YOW! Lambda Jam 2018 Failing Gracefully with EitherT
- YOW! Data 2016 Infrastructure for Smart Cities (with Sandy Taylor)
- Barnes, C., Abeywardena, D., Kodagoda, S. & Dissanayake, G. 2014 ‘Evaluation of Feature Detectors for KLT based Feature Tracking using the Odroid U3’, Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, ARAA, Melbourne
Patents
Lead inventor
US20160260007, ULTRASONIC THIN FILM TAGS
Co-inventor
US20160266313, THERMALLY PRINTED OPTIC CIRCUITS
US20160167986, SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR REDUCING CORROSION IN A REACTOR SYSTEM USING ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS
US20160122100, PACKAGING MATERIALS AND METHODS FOR THEIR PREPARATION AND USE
US20160077330, OPTICALLY-CONTROLLED MICROMIRROR DEVICE