Senior Software Engineer · AI/LLM Engineer
Go/Python · Distributed Systems · AI-Powered Systems
📍 Dubai, UAE · Working remotely

I'm one of the senior engineers behind ikman.lk — Sri Lanka's largest online marketplace, with millions of monthly users across 345,000+ active listings — and I own the design and build of its AI-powered ad-posting system: the architecture and the Python backend that runs it, with a Qdrant vector database for semantic ad matching and LLM-driven content generation. Alongside it, I build the Go APIs serving listings, search, and user interactions, where latency and uptime move revenue directly.

Nine years of backend work sits behind that — most of it in Go, most of it in systems that break in public if you get them wrong. What holds my interest now is the engineering around the model rather than the model itself: retrieval that stays fast, generation you can trust, and systems that behave the same on a bad day as a good one.

• 🔭 Senior Software Engineer at Saltside (ikman.lk / bikroy.com)
• 🧠 Focused on LLMOps, RAG, vector search, and AI agents in production
• 🎓 Completing an MSc in Artificial Intelligence
• 🏗️ Founding engineer, IoT, travel, and on-demand delivery — the domains differ, the failure modes rhyme
• 🗣️ Tamil (professional) · English (professional) · Sinhala (working)

Languages

AI / LLM

Distributed Systems & Messaging

Databases

Cloud & DevOps

Architecture: Clean & Event-Driven · CQRS · Saga Pattern · Fault-Tolerant Microservices · TDD

Senior Software Engineer — Saltside · Remote · Apr 2025 – Present Own the AI-powered ad-posting system at ikman.lk — led the architecture and built the Python backend end to end (Qdrant vector DB, semantic matching, LLM-driven content generation). Build and tune performance-critical Go APIs; set the platform's data strategy across MongoDB, MySQL, and Qdrant; drive technical direction through design sessions and code review.

Back End Developer – Golang — Volindo · Dubai, UAE (Remote) · Jul 2025 – Mar 2026 Event-driven travel infrastructure in Go on Clean Architecture — gRPC services, Kafka async processing, a distributed Stripe payment flow using the Saga pattern for consistency under partial failure. Domain depth in booking flows, pricing, real-time availability, and seasonal high-concurrency traffic.

Senior Software Engineer – Golang — WIOT360 · Abu Dhabi, UAE · Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 Two years on large-scale distributed IoT systems — Go web services and concurrency, SQL/NoSQL data modeling and performance tuning, Docker & Kubernetes, and CI/CD with TDD across a microservices architecture.

Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead (Founding Engineer) — DishServe · Colombo → Jakarta · Jul 2020 – Dec 2022 Founding engineer — built the product from scratch, from ideation to launch. Led the software team; drove the migration from monolith to microservices and PHP → Go; built Go microservices (goroutines, channels, Repository pattern, Go kit) on AWS with MySQL and API Gateway; established TDD/BDD and mentored the team.

Software Engineer — Yoho Bed · Colombo, Sri Lanka · Jul 2017 – Aug 2020 Owned the product development lifecycle across Yoho Mart, Mate, Shuttle, and the Yoho Life mobile app. Built with Laravel, MySQL, React/Redux, and the Repository pattern; delivered a Smart Pricing engine and integrated channel-manager, PayHere, and Textware.

Sri Lanka SDG Tracker — Designed and built from scratch (backend + frontend) to track Sri Lanka's progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, aligned with global indicator frameworks. PHP, Laravel, jQuery, AJAX, MySQL.

• M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence — Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), in progress
• B.Sc. in Information Systems — University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), 2015–2018
• Certificate in Machine Learning & Image Processing — Academy of Innovations Education, 2019

• ITIL® Foundation — PeopleCert
• Agile Scrum — Udemy
• Go (Basic) — HackerRank
• Developing SQL Databases — HackerRank
• Go Brain Teasers — Educative

Let's connect — I'm always happy to talk Go, distributed systems, and building AI that ships to production.