Welcome! I'm Nick.
I'm a senior ML Engineer and Engineering Manager at Canva in Sydney (but now based in Brisbane). As part of the AI Platform group I help build and maintain the ML tooling that enhances the experiences of over 220 million users every month.
I went to school at the University of Queensland (UQ), from which I earned bachelor's degrees in finance, psychology, and computer science.
During my time at UQ also I tutored for the School of IT & Electrical Engineering in object-oriented programming, systems engineering, and computational linguistics. I also spent far too much time building up the UQ Computing Society and otherwise neglecting my studies.
This website mainly exists as an excuse to occasionally dip my toes into the hell that is frontend development, but you can also check out the projects I work on, what I'm listening to, or how I'm tracking with my annual reading challenge.
If you'd like to get in contact you can reach me via LinkedIn or the email address in my CV.
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Engineering Manager (ML)
Dec 2024 - Present
Currently in the process of standing up the new Evaluation Platform team to supercharge the velocity of ML model development and integration into the Canva product
Technologies & Skills:
Senior ML Engineer
Feb 2021 - Dec 2024
As part of the ML Platform team, I maintained the infrastructure that powers Canva's wide array of machine learning applications
Supported ML systems serving over 220 million users monthly
Coordinated the onboarding program and materials for all new ML engineers
Technologies & Skills:
Senior Research Assistant
Jun 2018 - Feb 2024
Contributed to the development of Elpis, a user-friendly tool for automatic speech recognition (ASR) models
Built GUI using React and Flask supporting multiple ASR backend engines
Technologies & Skills:
Site Reliability Engineering Intern
Nov 2020 - Feb 2021
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:
Teaching Assistant
Jul 2018 - Dec 2020
Tutored and prepared materials for various computer science courses
Courses included: Voyages in Language Technologies (COMP3001), Computer Systems Principles and Programming (CSSE2310), and Programming in the Large (CSSE2002)
Technologies & Skills:
Software Engineering Intern
Dec 2019 - Feb 2020
As part of infrastructure team I built a shell script transpiler framework and reference generator targeting Python 3
I also created interactive playground using Python, Flask and React for real-time transpilation in browser
Technologies & Skills:
Software Engineering Intern
Jan 2019 - Feb 2019
Worked on parallelisation strategies for training recurrent neural nets
Applied to detection of sepsis from vital sign data
Technologies & Skills:
Bachelor of Science (Computer Science)
2016 - 2020
Graduated with Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science
Completed honours thesis: "Software-Level Implementation of Quantum Finite Automata"
Coursework:
Exchange Studies (Computer Science)
2018 - 2018
Exchange semester studying advanced computer science courses
Coursework:
Bachelor of Commerce (Finance)
2013 - 2015
Bachelor of Commerce with major in finance
Coursework:
Bachelor of Science (Psychology)
2013 - 2015
Bachelor of Science with extended major in Psychology, specializing in applied psychology
Coursework: