Nick Lambourne
Engineering Manager (AI) at Canva · Sydney, Australia
I'm an Engineering Manager (AI) at Canva in Sydney, where I lead the Evaluation Platform team — building the tooling we use to measure the quality of Canva's generative AI features, work that touches over 265 million users every month.
I studied at the University of Queensland, earning bachelor's degrees in finance, psychology, and computer science. Along the way I tutored object-oriented programming, systems engineering, and computational linguistics, and spent far too much time building up the UQ Computing Society.
This site is an excuse to keep my hands in frontend development. Have a look at the projects I work on, what I'm listening to, or how I'm tracking against my annual reading challenge.
Currently reading
Spetsnaz
Tor Bukkvoll
On repeat this week
Addendum
HEALTH
Latest post
Getting That Grad/Intern Role
Built with Next.js + HeroUI, bundled by Bazel, deployed on Heroku, and backed by MongoDB. It's one of the projects I tinker with.
Experience and education
Founded and lead the Evaluation Platform team — 11 engineers building the internal tooling Canva uses to measure the quality of its generative AI features
Led delivery of a head-to-head "arena" service that pits generative AI models against each other across mediums (text, image, video, audio, 3D) and criteria, with first-class support for multi-turn agentic workflows
Shipped tooling that brings the ergonomics of pytest, jest, and JUnit to non-deterministic generative AI features, later extended to continuous evaluation on live production data via Weights & Biases Weave
Host of Canva's recurring internal AI Forum (200–400 attendees) and interviewer for 70+ ML engineering candidates
Technologies & Skills:
PythonGenerative AIWeaveEngineering ManagementProgressed from Associate Data Engineer to ML Engineer to Senior ML Engineer on the ML Platform team
Built and operated the ML Platform used by 100+ engineers and researchers to train and serve 150+ production models, supporting features reaching over 265 million users monthly
Cut ML platform fixed costs by 85% (>$500k saved annually) by rebuilding the cross-region Kubernetes training clusters around a scale-to-zero Karpenter architecture
Shipped a Java library that streams live inference inputs and outputs from production ML services through AWS Kinesis Firehose to S3 for downstream reinforcement learning
Owned the distroless Nix/Bazel base images that all ML training and serving compute ran on, and designed the onboarding program — covering Weights & Biases experiment tracking and Argo Workflows — used by every new ML engineer
Technologies & Skills:
PythonJavaKubernetesKarpenterArgo WorkflowsAWSNix
BazelTerraformJsonnetCUDA
Architected and developed Elpis, a user-friendly automatic speech recognition (ASR) tool with a React/Flask GUI over multiple back-end engines
Built on the Kaldi ASR library (a complex C++/Bash stack); found traditional HMM/GMM methods outperformed neural approaches on the low-resource Indigenous languages we worked with
As a member of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, ran workshops for language experts at conferences (PULiiMA) and the CoEDL Summer School
Open-source project
Elpis — Open-source speech-recognition pipeline aimed at low-resource languages and linguistic fieldwork.
Open-source project
Hermes — Cross-platform desktop app for turning ELAN linguistic-analysis files into ML training datasets.
Technologies & Skills:
PythonReactFlaskMachine LearningSpeech RecognitionKaldi ASR
I was attached to the Platform SRE team
Worked on full stack projects related to reporting service level objective (SLO) performance to internal teams
Technologies & Skills:
PostgreSQLJavaSpringTypeScriptSREMonitoringTutored and prepared materials for various computer science courses
Course taught
Voyages in Language Technologies (COMP3001)
Course taught
Computer Systems Principles and Programming (CSSE2310)
Course taught
Programming in the Large (CSSE2002)
Technologies & Skills:
JavaCSystems ProgrammingTeachingComputational LinguisticsBuilt a shell-to-Python transpiler framework and reference generator (Python, Flask, React) for Canva's infrastructure team, with an interactive in-browser playground for real-time transpilation
Integrated the AST library from ShellCheck (Haskell) to parse Bash into an intermediate representation suitable for conversion to Python
Technologies & Skills:
PythonFlaskReactTranspilersShellHaskell
Developed parallelisation strategies for training recurrent neural nets to detect sepsis from vital-sign data
Introduced Python typing, type-checking, and documentation practices as the team's first sustained engineering-best-practice contributions
Technologies & Skills:
PythonMachine LearningRNNsParallel ComputingGraduated with Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science
Active throughout the degree in the UQ Computing Society (UQCS), a ~500-member student-run technical society — elected president for the 2019 term
- Grew membership 30%, doubled the number of events run, and raised sponsorship revenue 75% over the presidential term
- Programmed and ran 50+ technical talks across 2019 and 2020 — UQCS's flagship public event series, with sessions streamed and archived on the society's YouTube channel
- Oversaw the society's open-source projects, including UQCSbot, the society's Python Slack bot
- Founded The Router, UQCS's technical-interview podcast — set the editorial direction, recruited hosts and guests, and handled production + distribution
Honours thesis
Software-Level Implementation of Quantum Finite Automata
Volunteering
UQ Computing Society — UQ's student-run technical society — ~500 members, weekly talks, hackathons, and open-source.
Open-source project
Slackblocks — Python API for building type-safe Slack Block Kit messages without hand-writing JSON.
Coursework:
High Performance ComputingAlgorithms & Data StructuresDiscrete MathematicsSystems ProgrammingDatabase SystemsSoftware Engineering
Exchange semester studying advanced computer science courses
Coursework:
Operating SystemsTheory of ComputationComputer NetworksProgramming LanguagesQuantum ComputingCourse list
Bachelor of Commerce (Finance)
Coursework:
Corporate FinanceInvestments & Portfolio ManagementFinancial MarketsEconometricsDerivatives & Risk ManagementBanking & Lending DecisionsAccountingCourse list
Bachelor of Science (Psychology)
Coursework:
PsychopathologySocial PsychologyDevelopmental PsychologyPsychotherapies & CounsellingResearch MethodsStatistics