Melbourne, AU About me
I moved into AI on purpose — and I build the real thing
I'm Manusha Fernando, an AI Engineer based in Melbourne. My path here was deliberate: I started in Network Technology & Cyber Security in Sri Lanka, then moved to Australia to do a Bachelor of Artificial Intelligence at Deakin, finishing in November 2025. Somewhere in there I stopped wanting to study AI and started wanting to ship it.
So I did. I co-founded BYD Home, a live marketplace; I built an RFQ parser that runs inside a manufacturer; and I've shipped self-initiated projects with metrics I can stand behind. The thread is the same everywhere: take a hard problem all the way to something real people use, and stay to keep it running.
The other half of the job is people. I can take technical work and explain it to whoever needs to sign off — I've done the migration, the training, and the documentation. That's the part that makes me safe to hire, not just capable.
What I build
Production AI, with the boring parts done properly
Unstructured → structured
Turning messy human input — emails, PDFs, free text — into clean, validated, structured data. It's the problem behind bydhome, the TriCab parser, and my invoice pipeline.
Cheap and reliable at scale
Hybrid rule + model routing, confidence thresholds, and evaluation that runs on thousands of samples — so the system is affordable and provably good, not just impressive in a demo.
Shipped, and explained
I take it from schema to live, keep a human in the loop where it matters, and can walk any stakeholder through what it does and why.
The path
Career & education timeline
AI Engineer (contract)
TriCab
Built a production RFQ parser that turns unstructured request-for-quote input into structured, validated data — with a human approving every quote.
Founding Engineer
BYD Home
Helping build a live real-estate marketplace as an equity partner. I own the AI layer and a good part of the product, from schema to shipped features.
ML Engineer Intern
DataBytes
Built evaluation frameworks (ROUGE / BLEU / BERTScore) across 20k+ samples, with deployment to the HuggingFace Hub and cloud.
IT & Automation Intern
Monash Tax Accounting
Automated internal workflows with n8n, ran a GoDaddy → Microsoft 365 migration, and trained staff — shipping and communicating in equal measure.
Bachelor of Artificial Intelligence
Deakin University, Australia
A formal AI degree, completed November 2025. The deliberate move into AI, finished in Australia.
Higher Diploma, Network Technology & Cyber Security
Cardiff Metropolitan University, Sri Lanka
Where the technical foundation started, before I committed to AI.
If that sounds like someone you want on the team
One email is all it takes. I'll reply with something concrete.