From Curiosity to Reliability

I build systems that cannot afford to fail.

That sentence took me fifteen years to earn. For a long time, I was not sure I would get there.

I was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is a small island in the Indian Ocean, warm most of the year and green in a way that stays with you.

In 2006 my parents brought home a Pentium 3 machine with 128 MB of RAM, a 16 MB graphics card, and a heavy CRT monitor that made the desk creak.

By any modern standard it was old. To me it was the most interesting object I had ever seen.

I did not want to play games on it. I wanted to know what happened inside when I pressed a key and why the fan changed sound when the workload changed. That question became a habit.

I spent my pocket money on children's electronics magazines and tried to build whatever I saw on the pages.

PCB boards, resistors, capacitors, LEDs, buzzers, and loose wires slowly took over my desk and then the floor around it.

My mother had one rule. Do not break things that still work. I broke that rule more than I should have.

At twelve I sat the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam because I wanted to test myself against something real.

At university I studied computer science. The labs were good and the friends were better. We built things with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Microbit boards and stayed late because nobody wanted to leave before the project worked.

The part that changed me most was freelancing. I funded my tuition and expenses through client work while studying.

Many times I accepted projects before I knew every answer. Then I worked backwards from the deadline, reading documentation for hours until I understood enough to deliver properly.

There was no AI shortcut then. Ownership meant doing the hard part when nobody was watching.

My first professional role was at SyLabs, a startup where small teams carried full responsibility.

Outside tutorials, software behaves differently. Real users depend on it. Deadlines are real and mistakes have real consequences.

That chapter taught me to treat code as infrastructure people must trust, not just text that compiles.

In 2021 I joined Zebra Technologies in Sri Lanka and started on SmartLens, an RFID based system where software had to work in the physical world.

Later I moved to a new department where I became the first DevOps engineer in the team. There was no platform to inherit and no existing release pipeline to extend.

Around twenty five engineers were spending days on manual build and release work. That was the baseline I had to change.

I designed and built the full DevOps flow from the ground up. Cloud infrastructure, Jenkins pipelines, automated testing and reporting, artifact publishing to JFrog Artifactory, and deployment delivery to production.

Release cycles that used to take three or four days of manual coordination became automated runs that finished in under two hours.

The biggest change was not just speed. Deployments stopped being a stressful event and became a normal, trusted process.

At LSEG I worked with teams connected to London Stock Exchange, Turquoise products, and Millennium Surveillance systems.

In that environment a bug is not an inconvenience. Systems must be correct, auditable, traceable, and recoverable under pressure.

Later, as a senior engineer in Millennium Surveillance's cloud team, I owned work across cloud cost governance, pipeline hardening, service upgrades, and a full GitLab migration.

That chapter taught me to operate with near zero margin for error while still making practical engineering decisions at pace.

In 2025 my wife and I moved to Oulu, Finland to build the next part of our lives.

It meant a new country, new language, and a new professional ecosystem. We moved without a guaranteed landing because we believed choosing difficulty deliberately is how growth continues.

Finland has been exactly as hard and exactly as rewarding as that sounds. It has taught me the kind of patience that keeps building even when progress is slow.

I am not looking for any DevOps role. I am looking for teams that care deeply about reliability and the developer experience around their platforms.

The problems I want to own sit at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, system reliability, and cost aware engineering at scale.

I want to be the engineer who helps the wider organization move faster with confidence because the underlying platform is calm, secure, and dependable.

The child who spent evenings taking electronics apart in Colombo was not fascinated by the parts. He was fascinated by the fact that it worked.

I still chase that same idea now. Build systems so well made and quietly reliable that people depending on them do not need to think about them.

The machine was never the point. Trust was always the point, and I have spent fifteen years learning how to earn it.