Upon graduating with honours from the Faculty of Law in the University of Colombo, Austin successfully completed two graduate programs at the Harvard Law School. Admitted to the bar of the District of Columbia, he worked at leading law firms in Washington, DC and Boston.

Austin was the first foreign legal counsellor of the law firm Makarim & Taira S where he supervised and mentored about a dozen Indonesian associates. At Makarim & Taira S, Austin negotiated and documented billions of dollars worth of cross-border transactions including Build Operate and Transfer projects, oil and gas as well as coal production sharing contracts and contract of work respectively, project finance, and hotel management contracts. Going back to his first love which is academia, Austin taught various law subjects in Singapore. These included courses in comparative company law, joint venture law, and comparative constitutional law. At the Singapore Management University, Austin was the founding instructor of the course entitled “Ethics and Social Responsibility” which he taught for more than seventeen years to about a thousand undergraduates. Austin taught a course on foreign investment law. He also taught courses in Jurisprudence and Arbitration in the City University of Hong Kong Law School. He worked as the International Consultant on commercial law reform in Pakistan for a project run by the Asia Foundation and funded by the Asian Development Bank. Austin has presented papers on various law topics in many countries. He was a facilitator on the topic of Constitutionalism for members of the Sri Lanka Parliament. He  served as a member of the Board of Experts attached to the Steering Committee established by Parliament on the development of a new constitution for Sri Lanka.

Austin lives in Santa Barbara, California and spends time in Sri Lanka and Singapore where he consults to foreign investors who wish to benefit from bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements.