Niall Heffernan

1. 2025 – Present

   Senior Engineer

   Leonardo.Ai (A Canva Company)

   Part of the engineering team building one of the world's leading generative AI platforms for visual content creation.

2. 2023 – 2025

   Senior Engineer

   Splash Music — San Francisco (Remote)

   Roblox's largest music creation platform (500M+ plays), backed by $20M USD from Khosla Ventures and the Amazon Alexa Fund. Working with former Amazon, Twitch and Spotify engineers and the AWS AI Innovation Lab to deliver AI-powered music generation at scale:

   • Architected and built the companion web app in Next.js/React, serving as the primary interface for AI music creation and user library management.
   • Designed AWS infrastructure (Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, S3) handling AI music generation and 100M+ audio streams per month.
   • Developed ML inference pipelines for music generation models, integrating audio feature extraction and style transfer into the product.
   • Built timbre transfer prototypes and ML pipelines that contributed to published research on neural codec language models for controllable music synthesis (Amazon Science, 2026).
3. 2011 – 2023

   Founder & Technical Director / CTO

   Studio None

   Founded and scaled a digital product studio from a solo freelance operation to a 30-person team delivering software products for enterprise and government clients:

   • Set technical direction and led delivery on platforms serving millions of users for clients including Expedia, government departments, and national brands.
   • Built and managed engineering, DevOps, and QA teams; established CI/CD pipelines, code review culture, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
   • Conceived, built, and sold an e-commerce product that won a Chamber of Commerce Small Business Innovation Award.
   • Oversaw commercial operations: client acquisition, contracts, hiring, P&L, and strategic partnerships.
4. 2019 – 2021

   Director & Lead Educator

   Work Restart (Not-for-Profit)

   Helped build Australia's first digital innovation lab inside a prison, creating pathways from incarceration to employment through technology education:

   • Designed and delivered a full technical curriculum: programming fundamentals, web development, graphic design, 3D modelling, and IT systems administration.
   • Built entrepreneurship and trade training programs alongside the lab, giving participants multiple pathways to employment on release.
   • Operated across the executive team, driving business development, securing partnerships, and managing program delivery and reporting.
5. 2010 – 2012

   Senior Full Stack Developer

   Mettro

   Technical lead on digital products for enterprise clients at one of Australia's top-tier digital agencies:

   • Led the Ray White account end-to-end, architecting and delivering property platform features at scale across web and mobile.
   • Built high-traffic campaign sites for nationally recognised events (Red Nose Day, Bathurst 1000) under tight deadlines.
   • Delivered projects for John Wiley & Sons, Allianz, and multiple government departments.
6. 2008 – 2010

   Data Centre & Network Operations Manager

   Digital Sense

   Joined pre-launch and helped build a commercial data centre from construction to live operations, managing the facility and its infrastructure for enterprise clients:

   • Designed and deployed multi-rack enterprise cloud and virtualisation infrastructure, network architecture, and storage systems.
   • Managed incident response, escalation procedures, and SLA compliance across the facility.
   • Engineered a custom remote monitoring and automation platform for lights-out data centre management, reducing on-site intervention requirements.
   • Designed and built electronic security and environmental monitoring systems for the physical facility.
7. 2006 – 2008

   Senior Technician – Network Operations Centre

   Melbourne IT (ASX-listed)

   24/7 network operations for one of Australia's largest IT infrastructure companies, responsible for uptime across Melbourne IT and its subsidiaries:

   • Led incident response and root cause analysis for critical outages across DNS, hosting, and enterprise managed services.
   • Monitored and maintained infrastructure supporting millions of domain registrations and hosted services nationally.

Technical Skills

Awards & Press