// WHO I AM
Precision is a team sport
Software Engineer in Galle, Sri Lanka. I build production systems end to end, and I can tell you what I rejected on the way to each one.
Most of what I know came from shipping things that had to keep working. An 86,000-line marketplace across four retail verticals and three languages, a computer-vision pipeline that had to generalise across capture conditions, and client platforms running on commercial domains where a broken build is somebody else's revenue.
I work across the whole stack because the interesting problems sit between the layers. A model is only useful behind a service that does not leak its keys, and a design system is only real once somebody has had to implement it.
Before any of that, I spent eight years on the Kandyan Ves stage. Two Presidential Awards with the team, and a very large number of rehearsals. Precision is a team sport, and you rehearse until it's invisible.
// TRAJECTORY
Experience
- Mar 2026 to PresentCurrent
Software Engineer (AI & Full-Stack)
Zonova Tech · Sri Lanka
Engineer on Zonova (zonova.lk), a multi-vendor marketplace across four retail verticals (flowers, cakes, clothing and gifts) unified behind one cart, checkout, search and wishlist.
- Designed and shipped the platform's AI layer. Google Gemini sits behind a server-side proxy with multi-key failover pooling and request logging, powering image generation, photo-match against live shop inventory, a canvas design studio and virtual try-on.
- Implemented passkey (WebAuthn) and native biometric authentication, plus a three-tier role and permission system covering platform admins, shop owners and shop staff.
- Built vendor and admin dashboards covering real-time order feeds, catalogue and inventory management, quotation and bidding inboxes, and analytics with date-range filtering.
- Shipped the Android app from the same codebase via Capacitor, with push notifications, camera and native share, alongside a PWA with SEO prerendering.
- Localised the platform across English, Sinhala and Tamil, with local payment (PayHere) and branch-based delivery.
- Established the testing baseline, covering unit and component tests (Vitest, Testing Library), API tests (Supertest), Firestore security-rules tests against the emulator, and Playwright end-to-end coverage.
- Hardened the production deployment with Content Security Policy, HSTS preload, and strict frame-ancestor and permissions policies.
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Firebase
- Google Gemini
- Capacitor
- Vite
- Playwright
- Vitest
- Feb 2026 to PresentCurrent
Technical Associate, SISEPUEDE
UN Environment Programme Copenhagen Climate Centre · Remote / Sri Lanka
Technical contributor to the Integrated Assessment for Article 6 (IAA6) programme, covering emissions and mitigation modelling for Sri Lanka, Costa Rica and Peru under the Paris Agreement.
- Write and maintain Python for the SISEPUEDE integrated assessment framework across nine analysis notebooks and two reusable modules, run emissions and energy transformation scenarios, and package the deliverables.
- Prepare and validate underlying datasets, and participate in programme workshops and technical review sessions.
- Python
- pandas
- Jupyter
- Integrated assessment modelling
- Scenario analysis
- Oct 2025 to Feb 2026
Associate Software Engineer
Zonova Tech · Sri Lanka
Built and shipped client web platforms in Next.js and TypeScript, including a study-abroad consultancy platform and a tour operator booking site, both live on commercial domains.
- Engineered the SEO layer on both sites, covering structured data, schema markup, generated sitemaps and semantic metadata, with WhatsApp enquiry routing and transactional email integrated end to end.
- Contributed storefront and vendor dashboard features to the Zonova marketplace.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- SEO
- Jul 2025 to Sep 2025
Software Engineering Intern
Zonova Tech · Sri Lanka
Shipped React and TypeScript features into live client projects, including the Edu Gate Consultancy and Gimhani Tours builds.
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Framer Motion
- GSAP
// CAPABILITY INDEX
What I use, stated honestly
- Production
- Shipped and maintained in live systems.
- Working
- Used on real projects, with room to go deeper.
- LanguagesWhat the work is written in.
- TypeScript, ProductionJavaScript, ProductionPython, ProductionC#, WorkingDart, WorkingPHP, WorkingSQL, ProductionHTML, ProductionCSS, Production
- FrontendInterfaces shipped to real users.
- React, ProductionNext.js, ProductionAstro, ProductionTailwind CSS, ProductionFramer Motion, ProductionGSAP, ProductionVue.js, WorkingThree.js, Working
- BackendServices, APIs and the contracts between them.
- Node.js, Production.NET, WorkingExpress, ProductionFastAPI, ProductionFlask, WorkingDjango, WorkingLaravel, WorkingREST API design, Production
- DataStorage, modelling and query.
- Firestore, ProductionMongoDB, ProductionMySQL, WorkingSQL, ProductionSQLite, Production
- Cloud & MobileWhere it runs and how it ships.
- Firebase, ProductionCloudflare Workers, ProductionCloudflare R2, ProductionVercel, ProductionAzure, WorkingFlutter, WorkingCapacitor (Android), Production
- AI/ML & DevOpsModels in production, and what they ship on.
- Google Gemini, ProductionUltralytics YOLO, ProductionDocker, WorkingAWS, WorkingOpenCV, ProductionPyTorch, ProductionComputer vision, ProductionNLP, Production
- Modelling & DataClimate scenarios, the analysis behind them and the charts that explain it.
- pandas, ProductionNumPy, ProductionMatplotlib, Productionseaborn, ProductionJupyter, ProductionTableau, WorkingIntegrated assessment modelling, ProductionEmissions & energy scenario analysis, Production
- Testing & QualityThe baseline I established on the marketplace.
- Playwright, ProductionVitest, ProductionTesting Library, ProductionSupertest, WorkingPHPUnit, WorkingLighthouse, Production
- PracticesHow the work gets done and kept safe.
- Git & code review, ProductionWebAuthn / passkeys, ProductionCSP & HSTS, ProductionInternationalisation, ProductionSEO, ProductionPWA, Production
// THE RECORD
Credentials
Everything below is independently checkable. The BestWeb.lk results are published by the LK Domain Registry — the crests link straight to the winners listing, the certificate is reproduced in full with the date and both signatures on it, and the trophies are shown with their engraving legible, naming the entrant and the winning domain.
Certificate of Appreciation
BestWeb.LK, LK Domain Registry
“This certificate is awarded to Akila Nilupul for development of the website zonova.lk.”
Presented at the BestWeb.LK Awards Ceremony 2026 in Colombo, to the developers behind the winning websites. zonova.lk won two of them.
Gold Winner · Judged category, 2026
Best Micro Enterprises Website
“Awarded to Zonova Pvt Ltd for their website www.zonova.lk”
I built the winning site end to end — storefront, vendor dashboard, and the services behind both.
Verify on BestWeb.lk
Winner · Decided by public vote, 2026
Most Popular Micro Enterprises Website
“Awarded to Zonova Pvt Ltd for their website www.zonova.lk”
The same site, voted for by the public — the build people chose to keep using.
Verify on BestWeb.lk
Research
AI-Powered Dental Prosthetic and Recommendation System
Nilupul H.M., Fonseka N., Akalanka A.U. · School of Computing, ESOFT Metro Campus, Galle, Sri Lanka
Sole author-developer; the two co-authors supervised the project at ESOFT Metro Campus.
- Status
- Published
- Venue
- ESOFT International Conference 2026
- Presented
- 30 August 2026
- Format
- 8-minute oral presentation, 2 minutes of questions
Proceedings of the ESOFT International Conference (EICON) 2026, ESU, Kandy, Sri Lanka, pp. 36–43 · ISSN 3121-5122 · ISBN 978-624-6610-01-2 · Indexing pending
An integrated, explainable web-based decision-support prototype that pairs automated panoramic-radiograph analysis with structured patient data to produce ranked prosthetic treatment recommendations. A fine-tuned YOLOv8-Nano detector reads ten classes of dental condition; a hybrid rule-based and heuristic scoring engine over a nine-treatment knowledge base ranks candidates by clinical, demographic and budget factors and returns the top five with rationales, indicative costs and success-rate estimates, plus a downloadable clinical-handover report.
Commercial dental AI reads radiographs and marks pathology. It does not say what to do about it for this particular patient. The contribution here is not detection accuracy — it is the integration: a working, inspectable pipeline where every ranked recommendation traces back to the finding that triggered it.
The engineering case study2 reviewers · Major revision · revised 18 July 2026 · accepted 31 July 2026
Both reviewers returned major revision. The resubmission expanded the recommendation engine's scoring in Methods, added Discussion paragraphs on error propagation and patient safety and on the ethical, regulatory and medico-legal position, widened the comparison with published prosthodontics AI, and restructured Future Work around clinical and usability evaluation.
2,990 words · 240-word structured abstract · 17 Vancouver references
YOLOv8-Nano (~3.01M parameters), fine-tuned from COCO-pretrained yolov8n.pt on 16,995 panoramic radiographs across 10 condition classes. Dental X-Ray Panoramic v3, CC BY 4.0.
| Evaluation | Split | Precision | Recall | mAP@0.5 | mAP@0.5:0.95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reported in the published paperEICON 2026 manuscript, Table 1 | validation1,500 images | 0.460 | 0.480 | 0.430 | 0.220 |
| Measured on the shipped checkpointevaluate_model.py → model_metrics.json, 25 August 2026, weights sha256 201a9933735b… | held-out test1,501 images | 0.629 | 0.584 | 0.581 | 0.298 |
The paper is fixed and reports the validation split it was written against; the test row is the shipped checkpoint on images it never saw, recorded with its weights digest.
Education
BEng (Hons) Software Engineering (Top-Up)
London Metropolitan University · United Kingdom
Second Class Honours, Upper Division (2:1)
BTEC Level 5 HND in Computing (Software Engineering)
ESOFT Metro Campus · Pearson, UK
Merit
Certificate in Information Technology (CIT)
ESOFT Metro Campus, Jul 2022 to Nov 2023
Certificate in English (CIE)
ESOFT Metro Campus, Jul 2022 to Nov 2023
Diploma in Information Technology (DITEC)
ESOFT Metro Campus, Jul 2022 to Jul 2023 · Merit
Diploma in English (DIE)
ESOFT Metro Campus, Jul 2022 to Feb 2023 · Distinction
Secondary education at Mahinda College, Galle, Sri Lanka.
Beyond the code
Presidential Award for Best Dancing Team of the Year
Kandy Esala Perahera. Awarded to the Kandyan Ves dancing team, presented by the President of Sri Lanka.
Presidential Award for Best Emerging Dancing Team of the Year
Kandy Esala Perahera. Awarded to the Kandyan Ves dancing team, presented by the President of Sri Lanka.
- Presidential Award, Best Dancing Team of the Year2025
- Best School Dancer of the Year2025
- Presidential Award, Best Emerging Dancing Team of the Year2024
- All Island Dancing Competitions, 3rd Place (Kandyan Group)2023
- All Island Dancing Competitions, 3rd Place (Low Country Group)2022
- School Dancing Team Leader2023 – 2024
- School Eastern Band Leader2023 – 2024
- Best School Eastern Band, National Day Celebration, Galle2019
// PAPER COPY
CV
Full CV, updated SEP 2026
Everything on this page, on two pages of A4. The PDF and the machine-readable version below are the same record, so they cannot drift apart from what you have just read.
Mr. Sameera Rukshan
Director & CTO, Zonova (Pvt) Ltd · formerly Tech Lead, Virtusa
Contact details on request
Mr. Pasan Weththasinghe
Centre Manager, ESOFT Metro Campus · Galle
Contact details on request
// ON THE RECORD
The room, not just the result
Award ceremonies, the conference, the programme workshops and eight years of Ves. The parts of the record a screenshot cannot carry.
BestWeb.lk 2026
Two national awards for Zonova, Gold for Best Micro Enterprises Website and Winner for Most Popular Micro Enterprises Website, plus the LK Domain Registry's Certificate of Appreciation for the developers behind them.