Founded by two engineers.
Draftworks Labs was founded by a civil engineer and an AI/software engineer. We build AI for work that has to be right, and we check it the way engineers check a design.
- Sheet
- DW-03
- Discipline
- Studio
- Founders
- 2
- Disciplines
- Civil · Software
AI / software engineer
Justin Barias
Justin is a software and AI engineer with a platform engineering background in DevOps, site reliability and distributed systems. He spent six years at Microsoft Australia, first in DevOps and SRE, then as a senior consultant in software engineering and AI, working on LLMs, copilots and retrieval-augmented generation.
He builds HoloDeck, an open-source, YAML-driven platform for developing, testing and deploying agents. At AI Engineer Melbourne 2026 he spoke about applying ML engineering discipline to agent development, with versioned artifacts, defined evaluators and systematic search in place of trial and error.
Before Microsoft he led site reliability engineering at MedicalDirector and worked as a cloud consultant at Readify.
Talks
- 2026AI Engineer Melbourne · Stop vibing your agents to production
- 2017DevOps DeepDive Sydney · Patterns and anti-patterns in CD pipelines
- 2017ExpertsLive Australia · CI/CD on VM Scale Sets and Kubernetes
- 2017Azure Global Bootcamp · CI/CD on VM Scale Sets and Kubernetes
Civil engineer
Jowenn Lua
Jowenn is a civil engineer whose project work spans rail, motorway and busway design. It includes Sydney Metro (TSE, SVC and OTS), the Ballina Bypass on the Pacific Highway, the Brisbane Airport Link Northern Busway tender design, the Gerringong Upgrade on the Princes Highway and the Rozelle Interchange on WestConnex.
He automates civil design in Autodesk Civil 3D and Dynamo, and has taught it in six Autodesk University classes since 2017, from Subassembly Composer to generative design.
He is an Autodesk Expert Elite alumnus and took part in Autodesk's Gunslinger programme in Sydney (2016) and its Inside the Factory programmes in Potsdam (2018) and New Hampshire (2020).
Autodesk University
- 2024CES1589-L · Dynamo for Civil 3D: hands-on for beginners
- 2023CES600726 · Getting started with generative design in Civil 3D
- 2020CES473668 · Supercharge your Dynamo graph with Civil 3D Toolkit
- 2019CES319333 · Dynamo in Civil 3D: unlocking the mystery of scripting
- 2018CI225967 · Automation in Civil 3D for construction documentation
- 2017CI123653 · Civil 3D and Subassembly Composer in practice
Links
Justin Barias
- Websitejustinbarias.io(opens in a new tab)
- Writingjustinbarias.io/blog(opens in a new tab)
- GitHubgithub.com/justinbarias(opens in a new tab)
- HoloDeckgithub.com/justinbarias/holodeck(opens in a new tab)
- LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/justin-barias-89ba6521(opens in a new tab)
- AI Engineer Melbourne 2026webdirections.org/ai-engineer-melbourne-26/speakers/justin-barias.php(opens in a new tab)
A workshop mindset.
We build AI for regulated fields where precision matters. Fantasy sports and betting come first, starting with HoopValuator; betting markets price risk much like securities markets do. Next is a civil engineering software factory that turns specifications into agent-built designs with formal checks against engineering codes.
Both lines follow the same process. We specify the problem, prove what can be proved, and check every output against data or a published code.
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