Career

My journey

15+ years of building software, leading teams, and shipping AI systems across Sri Lanka, the UK, and beyond. Every chapter shaped the next.

Dr. Dulan Dias

Dr. Dulan Dias

Chief Technology Officer · Ph.D. · Founder

15+
Years experience
60+
Team built
31
Articles published
6
Awards & honours

Experience

Jun 2025 - Present · 1 yr 3 mos·Full-time
Tellme AI Limited
🚀

Chief Technology Officer

Tellme AI Limited

🏆 Won Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize 2025 (Creative Industries). Building a centralized, scalable platform that powers AI-driven point-and-discover experiences across museums and cultural attractions.

Chief Technology OfficerDec 2025 - Present · 9 mos·HybridView
  • Building a centralized, scalable platform that brings together AI capabilities, application layers, and infrastructure to significantly reduce the time, cost, and effort required to deploy the solution at new museums and attractions.
  • Designing automation-first deployment pipelines and standardized workflows to enable rapid, repeatable rollouts of the point-and-discover experience across multiple cultural venues.
  • Actively developing a centralized Aggregation & Observability Platform to monitor all deployed museums from a single portal, unifying visitor engagement, behavioural insights, feedback, and system health.
  • Designed and built the self-service museum kiosk (Android 14, Kotlin + Jetpack Compose) that sells on-site access to the digital guide end to end: attract loop, card tap, and a printed receipt carrying the redeem QR, opening a second sales channel that runs without staff involvement.
  • Integrated unattended payment hardware and peripherals directly, driving the myPOS Sigma Unattended SDK alongside an ESC/POS receipt printer, QR referral scanning, and NFC admin access, behind a terminal abstraction so payment providers can be swapped without touching the flow.
  • Built the fleet management layer for kiosks in the field, covering heartbeat and command polling, remote reboot/refresh/reprint, silent over-the-air updates with staged rollout via device-owner PackageInstaller, a watchdog, and durable on-device logging for crash triage.
  • Made the kiosk resilient and locale-aware for real venue conditions: offline ticketing fallback when the network drops, on-device evaluation of museum opening hours so it closes itself outside them, per-kiosk configuration overrides, and simultaneous bilingual screens (e.g. Welsh alongside English).
  • Kept visitor presence detection privacy-preserving by processing the camera feed entirely on-device and transmitting only abstract presence events, never imagery.
  • Working hands-on with museum visitors on-site, observing real usage of the mobile point-and-discover web app to identify friction, bottlenecks, and usability gaps and drive true product–market fit.
  • Defining the platform and product strategy with a strong focus on user-centric design, operational scalability, and continuous learning, ensuring the experience improves with every new deployment.
Founding EngineerJun 2025 - Dec 2025 · 7 mos·United Kingdom · RemoteView

InnovateUK-funded tech startup building a visitor-centric point-and-discover experience for museums and attractions.

  • Fine-tuned and integrated the provided computer vision components (embeddings, ONNX inference, model outputs) into the mobile web application, optimising performance and reducing battery drain on low-end devices by over 50%.
  • Designed and built the full mobile-first, edge-optimised web application for a point-and-discover experience used in museums and cultural spaces, including the frontend (Next.js) and backend (FastAPI) along with all supporting infrastructure.
  • Developed the complete backend architecture using Python (FastAPI) and MongoDB, covering APIs, data models, content pipelines, and embedding management workflows.
  • Built the comprehensive Admin & Content Management Portal, enabling curators and internal teams to manage collections, metadata, assets, geometries, and discovery logic through a streamlined interface.
  • Architected and implemented the full CI/CD and DevOps ecosystem using GitHub Actions, with automated builds, deployments, testing pipelines, and environment management.
  • Delivered a reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS, including Amplify, CloudFront, S3, EC2, CloudWatch, and AWS Backup, ensuring performance, monitoring, and resiliency across the entire product.
  • Designed and built a rule-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Prompt Engine: a dynamic prompt construction system using definitions, templates, rules, and composable components, powering the conversational AI layer of the application.
  • Delivered all core components (frontend, backend, admin portal, DevOps pipelines, AWS infrastructure, integrations, and performance optimisations) within a rapid 4 to 6 month timeline to achieve a production-ready MVP.
Agentic AIComputer VisionNext.jsFastAPIMongoDBAWSAndroid · Kotlin
·
Mar 2017 - Present · 9 yrs 6 mos·Colombo, Sri Lanka
EchonLabs Private Limited
🏢

Founder

EchonLabs Private Limited

Bootstrapped from a university boarding room into Sri Lanka's go-to provider of insurtech, and scaled it to a team of 60+ through to a successful exit. I stayed hands-on the whole way — the systems below are ones I architected and built, not ones I signed off.

Founder2025 - Present·Colombo, Sri LankaView
  • Continuing as founder following the company's acquisition and my step back from the chief executive role.
Founder & Chief Executive Officer2017 - 2025·Colombo, Sri LankaView

Bootstrapped EchonLabs into the go-to provider of future-proof insurtech in Sri Lanka, recognised for driving digital transformation across the insurance sector.

  • Grew the company from a university boarding room to a team of 60+, through to a successful acquisition and exit. Drove 50% growth in insurance-tech adoption and built a low-code framework that cut development costs by roughly 30%.
  • Legify.ai — an AI legal-contract platform. Led the end-to-end architecture, and engineered a jurisdiction-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation engine that tailors legal content to the regional laws and compliance frameworks that actually apply. The hard part was not retrieval; it was making jurisdiction a first-class dimension of it. Multi-tenant SaaS, role-based access, audit logging.
  • InsurEL — the most complex architecture of my career. A modular ecosystem of 6+ integrated web and mobile systems covering the full spectrum of insurer operations: microservices-based and API-first, supporting serverless and serverful deployment from one core, with dynamic workflow builders, AI risk engines, fraud monitoring and adaptive actuarial modules.
  • PropEL — a performance and KPI system for sales teams that replaced Excel-driven workflows. Built around a formula builder querying Oracle, MongoDB, APIs and master files, so users compose complex KPI rules without writing code, with real-time analytics and flexible commission structures.
  • LOLC Life Assurance OneClick — architected and launched what is now the #1 insurance self-care app in Sri Lanka, recognised among the best in the South Asian region. Policies, payments, claims and status across iOS, Android and web, on AWS serverless microservices.
  • Janashakthi Life — a digital insurance platform adopted by 15+ financial institutions across 300+ branches, including rural locations. Architected for low-bandwidth environments so it stayed usable over 2G and 3G, which is the constraint that decided most of the design.
Team BuildingEnterprise SoftwareInsurTechRAG & LLMsMicroservicesAWS
·
Mar 2019 - Jan 2021·Colombo, Sri Lanka
📚

Lecturer, Machine Learning & Computer Science

University of Sri Jayewardenepura

Taught Machine Learning, Object-Oriented Programming, and Computational Biology at undergraduate level. Mentored final-year project students in AI and software engineering research.

TeachingMachine LearningObject-Oriented ProgrammingResearch Supervision
·
Aug 2018 - Feb 2019·Colombo, Sri Lanka
💻

Trainee Software Engineer

CodeGen International

Developed reusable Angular UI components for cloud-based travel software migration. First professional experience in enterprise-scale software development.

AngularTypeScriptEnterprise Software

Education

Oct 2020 - Dec 2024·Belfast, United Kingdom
Queen's University Belfast
🎓

PhD, Artificial Intelligence & Data Science

Queen's University Belfast

Research focused on AI-driven healthcare optimisation, predictive modelling for critical care, novel machine learning algorithms, and R package development. Published research on LOS prediction with MIMIC-III, unsupervised discretisation, and applied ML for real-world clinical data.

Machine LearningHealthcare AIRPredictive ModellingResearch
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2014 - 2018·Colombo, Sri Lanka
🎓

B.Sc. (Hons) Computer Science, First Class

University of Sri Jayewardenepura

Graduated with First Class Honours. Strong foundation in mathematics, algorithms, and software engineering. Final-year project (Komposer) received the APICTA (Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance) Gold Award in the Tertiary category.

Computer ScienceFirst ClassAI Music Generation

Core competencies

AI & machine learning

Agentic AI systemsRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Large Language ModelsComputer VisionONNX · on-device inferenceTensorFlow · PyTorch · KerasScikit-learn · H2O.aiPrompt engineering systemsMLOps & model deployment

Architecture & platform

Distributed systemsMicroservices & API-first designServerless architectureAPI gatewaysMulti-tenant SaaSWorkflow & rules enginesEvent-driven pipelinesLow-bandwidth optimisationSystem integration

Engineering

Python · TypeScript · Java · RNext.js · React · AngularFastAPI · Node.jsReact NativeKotlin · Jetpack Compose (Android)MongoDB · PostgreSQL · OracleDocker · GitHub Actions · JenkinsGitLab · SonarQubeFigma

Cloud & infrastructure

AWS (Amplify · CloudFront · S3 · EC2)CloudWatch · AWS BackupCI/CD & DevOpsInfrastructure automationObservability & monitoringFleet & device managementPayment & hardware integration

Leadership

Team building (60+ engineers)Product & platform strategyCross-functional collaborationAgile / Scrum deliveryR&D managementMentorship & coachingInvestor relationsTechnical writing & publishing

Domain

InsurTech & BFSILegalTechHealthcare AICultural & heritage technologyEdTech & learning platformsEnterprise digital transformation

Awards & Recognition

Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize 2025
2025 · Innovate UK

Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize 2025

Recognised for pioneering agentic AI systems at Tellme AI

CSSL ICT Student of the Year
2019 · Computer Society of Sri Lanka

CSSL ICT Student of the Year

National recognition for outstanding achievement in ICT

Gold Award - APICTA 2018 (Tertiary)
2018 · Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance

Gold Award - APICTA 2018 (Tertiary)

Komposer project — Gold Award in the Tertiary category at the Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance Awards.

National Best Quality Software Awards
2018 · BCS Sri Lanka

National Best Quality Software Awards

Recognition of Excellence for software quality

JESA Silver Medal
2017-2018 · University of Sri Jayewardenepura

JESA Silver Medal

Academic excellence in Computer Science

Recognition of Excellence - Innovate Sri Lanka
2019 · Innovate Sri Lanka

Recognition of Excellence - Innovate Sri Lanka

Innovation and entrepreneurship recognition

In the field

Want to work together?

Whether you need a technical leader, a speaker, or a collaborator on something ambitious, I'd love to hear from you.