AI Engineer  ·  Sri Lanka  ·  Building in public

    Adithya Bandara, AI Engineer in Sri Lanka — IDEAtoEXECUTION

    I’m Adithya — an AI engineer who builds, teaches and builds in public. RAG systems, tracing-first agents and a 15-week ML course, shipped one commit at a time.

    Adithya Bandara, portrait in lime duotonePortrait / 01
    Adithya BandaraColombo, LK
    01 / Now

    Building in public, one commit at a time.

    What’s on my desk right now — the unfinished, the half-working and the shipped.

    01Shipping

    A RAG system on pgvector

    A Postgres knowledge base that ingests images, TXT, PDF, DOCX, PPT and Excel.

    02Tracing

    Agents you can see inside

    Per-run traces and cost-per-run tracking with Langfuse and Braintrust.

    03Exploring

    Memory, context & handoffs

    How agents remember, what they get to see, and who they pass work to.

    04Teaching

    ML Beginner Course

    Fifteen weeks, taught in Sinhala, with a deck and a notebook every week.

    02 / Selected work

    Three builds,(03)
    end to end.

    Each one started as a question and ended as something you can open, query or learn from.

    Cover: Personal RAG System — files flow through an embed step into a Postgres/pgvector embedding space
    Case 01

    Personal RAG System

    A Postgres/pgvector knowledge base I built for myself — drop in almost any file and ask it questions.

    View on GitHub ↗
    Problem

    Notes, slides, sheets and scans live in different formats, and none of it is searchable together.

    Approach

    Ingest images, TXT, PDF, DOCX, PPT and Excel into one Postgres knowledge base, embed it with pgvector, retrieve by similarity.

    Stack

    Postgres · pgvector · embeddings

    Outcome

    One knowledge base that answers across six file types.

    Cover: AI Agents with Tracing — an agent graph with handoffs beside a per-run trace and cost mock
    Case 02

    AI Agents with Tracing

    Problem

    Agents are black boxes: when a run goes wrong or gets costly, you can’t see why.

    Approach

    Trace every step and track cost per run; explore memory, context management and agent handoffs.

    Stack

    Langfuse · Braintrust

    Outcome

    Every run is inspectable and its cost is visible.

    View on GitHub ↗
    Cover: ML Beginner Course — a linear regression plot and a small neural network
    Case 03

    ML Beginner Course

    Problem

    Learning ML is harder when it isn’t taught in your own language.

    Approach

    15 weekly lessons in Sinhala, each with a deck and a notebook. Week 03 uses real Sri Lankan house-price data for linear regression.

    Stack

    Decks · notebooks · real datasets

    Outcome

    A 15-week path from linear models to neural nets.

    View the course ↗
    03 / Experience

    Shipping AI in production.

    From fine-tuning Whisper as an intern to leading RAG, agent and Text-to-SQL work today.

    Venture · 2024 — Present

    Qordiv

    Co-Founder. Building products at the intersection of AI and business.

    Avenir IT

    Kandy, Sri Lanka · 2 yrs
    Jun 2026 — PresentCurrent

    AI Engineer

    Full-time · Hybrid

    • Lead the design and development of RAG and agentic AI systems.
    • Architect Text-to-SQL workflows for complex data querying and analytics.
    Jan 2025 — Jun 2026

    Associate AI Engineer

    Full-time · Hybrid

    • Built and optimised AI models for real-world applications.
    • Owned data pipelines, model training and performance tuning, and shipped AI into production systems.
    Aug 2024 — Jan 2025

    AI Intern

    Internship · On-site

    • Fine-tuned Whisper models for speech-to-text and built MLOps pipelines for training, deployment and monitoring.
    • Built secure FastAPI services and tuned MySQL/PostgreSQL databases; prepared GCP VMs and Docker images for deployment.

    IDET — Institute of Digital Engineering Technology

    Sri Lanka
    2026 — PresentCurrent

    Part-Time Lecturer

    Part-time · Hybrid

    • Lead the AI/ML Masterclass: neural networks, model deployment and Python data science.
    • Mentor students on industry-standard development practices.
    2026 — 2028 · ExpectedBSc (Hons) Engineering — Computer ScienceUniversity of Moratuwa
    2022 — 2025Higher National Diploma in ITSLIATE · First Class Distinction
    04 / Teaching
    Adithya pointing upward in graduation robes, black and white
    Taught in Sinhala · සිංහල

    Teach what
    you build.

    Weeks

    Machine Learning
    Beginner Course

    A beginner-friendly ML course, taught in Sinhala. Every week ships with a slide deck and a notebook, so you can read it, run it and make it your own. I also lead the AI/ML Masterclass at IDET.

    Taught in SinhalaWeekly deckWeekly notebookReal datasets
    WEEK01
    WEEK02
    WEEK03
    WEEK04
    WEEK05
    WEEK06
    WEEK07
    WEEK08
    WEEK09
    WEEK10
    WEEK11
    WEEK12
    WEEK13
    WEEK14
    WEEK15
    Week 03

    Linear Regression

    Fit a line to real Sri Lankan house-price data — then read what the model actually learned.

    06 / Design craft

    Designer first,
    and it still shows.

    I started out as a designer, so I treat a design system like an AI workflow: a brief, some guardrails, a few focused agents and one output that stays in sync. Click any node to inspect it.

    workboards / design-system.flowIdle
    Inputbrief

    “Make AI that reads well — not just outputs that are technically correct.”

    Inputguardrails
    1. 01Hierarchy before decoration.
    2. 02Make the trace visible.
    3. 03Ship it, then sharpen it.
    Agenttypography
    Aa.
    Space GroteskInterJetBrains Mono
    Agentcolour
    Agentlayout
    Tooltokens
    color/accent↓Button/Primary↓every page
    Outputship
    Every page,
    in sync.
    ✓ 0 drift
    07 / About

    Hi, I’m
    Adithya.

    I’m an AI engineer based in Sri Lanka. I build retrieval systems and agents, trace what they do and what they cost, and teach what I learn along the way — in Sinhala, in public.

    Before engineering, I was a designer. I still sweat the type, the spacing and the system behind the screen.

    Based inSri Lanka
    RoleAI Engineer · Avenir IT
    FocusRAG · agents · tracing
    TeachesML, in Sinhala · IDET
    BuildingQordiv (co-founder)
    BackgroundDesign
    Adithya Bandara in graduation robes, smiling, holding a red scroll
    Graduation day
    08 / Contact

    Let’s build
    something.

    Working on RAG, agents or an AI-powered learning product? I’d love to hear about it.

    Email medammikaekanayaka1980@gmail.com
    Adithya tossing a graduation scroll into the air, lime duotone