Forming & Leading an Engineering Team of 60 Engineers in Sri Lanka to build the next generation wagering platform for Amused Group with:● Higher transactional throughput● Innovative product features● Lower operational overheads

Leading the convergence of the two largest revenue generating products in Pearson (MyLabs & Mastering) into a single platform on the cloud for:● Better customer experience● Faster & predictable feature delivery● Reduced operational costs Responsibilities Included:• Decision making on mode of migration (Lift & Shift vs Re-platform vs Re-write) based on trade-off analysis.• Planning, Execution, Monitoring & Refinement of migration, development & testing based on product roadmap priorities & team capacity.• Determining release & cut-over strategies based on business priorities & various technical parameters such as high availability requirements.• Driving the decomposition of features of a 15+ year old monolith into microservices based on feature, maintainability & capacity requirements.• Creating enthusiasm and improving productivity of the team through Full Stack Engineering Transformation of a team of 125 Engineers from various engineering disciplines.• Leading the talent acquisition, improvement & retention of a team of 75 engineers (solid line reports) along with a leadership team of 10 (Managers, Principal Engineers & Architects).• Maintaining the team productivity levels & quality of deliverables despite the various socioeconomic issues faced by the team members & the organization during the pandemic.

Leading a strategic offshore vendor team of 350 engineers to build a brand-new cloud-native learning platform with 40+ microservices for Pearson to:● Deliver next-generation interactive learning content● Enable implementation of emerging new business models● Reduce duplication of effort by having common functionality pre-builtResponsibilities Included:• Defining & executing the environment strategy for development, testing and staging environments to accelerate independent delivery of microservices and to enable early integration & performance testing.• Implementing the engineering workflow with Fail-Fast strategy to provide early & accurate feedback to developers in lower environments, but Fail-Safe in higher environments.• Introduction of developer tools (eg:- meta repo, dive), composition of development environment (eg:- docker-compose, minikube) and defining steps in CI/CD to improve developer productivity.• Refining the test automation strategy and driving TDD to incorporate techniques such as TestPyramid & TestMatrix for improved test efficiency, resulting in massive cost savings.• Driving the implementation of Semantic Versioning for individual microservices as well as for the entire platform as a part of CI/CD pipeline to enable versioning of service endpoints, canary releases & quick rollbacks.• Forming & leading the Engineering Acceptance Team with a set of Principal & Lead Engineers from Pearson to work on-site with the vendor team, propagate best practices and improve the quality of the deliverables.

Initiating & driving the Stability & Sustainability (S&S) program in Pearson Higher Education to:● Increase the availability of mission critical applications● Improve the predictability of application performance● Reduce the mean time to resolution (MTTR) of major incidentsResponsibilities Included:• Identifying top 10 problems in Higher Education Platforms by analyzing incidents & problems reported in 2013 - 2015.• Forming a multi disciplinary team of 14 Principal & Lead engineers across Sri Lanka & USA to drive root cause analysis and the resolution of identified major problems.• Publishing & driving the S&S roadmap in collaborating with engineering leadership in various parts of the organization and vendor teams.• Establishing the basics for Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) and helping spin up a separate unit under senior leadership to drive Enterprise CSI across Pearson.• Introduction of Full Stack Analysis & Optimization process in order to diagnose the potential S/W & H/W issues at various layers.• Implementation of Global Transaction Tracker (GTT) for tracing issues in a distributed environment to reduce MTTR in indecent resolution process. • Transformation of the team to a fully integrated SRE team across Sri Lanka & USA to support 12 products 24x5 basis with follow-the-sun model.

Building & Leading the mobile application development team in Pearson to:● Expand the mobile app footprint in education market● Achieve strategic goals of each business unit through mobile applications● Drive innovation in Leaning ApplicationsResponsibilities Included:• Laying out & driving the mobile application development strategy based on business & technology goals for all the business units in Pearson in 2015/16.• Growing the in-house mobile development team from 4 to 25 engineers in 2015/16 and transitioning in 75% of work from vendors across the globe.• Consolidation of the mobile application roadmap and elimination of duplication & waste resulting in higher ROI.• Driving unified branding campaign for mobile application and centralized management of mobile app releases for better compliance of standards.• Setting up a R&D team & Incubator to materialize the new concepts & business ideas with minimum time-to-market and lower costs.• Sponsoring the internship program and grooming more than 10 engineers from undergraduates to cross-platform & native mobile developers.

● Driving the transition of engineering ownership of many cash-cow products to Sri Lanka based team successfully.● Leading a successful, high-quality, on-time delivery of the re-design of the largest revenue generation product in Pearson HigherEd space● Managing a team of 20 - 30 engineers at different levels of experience and of various tech-stacks such as Java & .NET

● Successfully leading engineering teams and delivering critical / high risk features of high quality on time● Leading one of the largest web accessibility efforts in Pearson HigherEd and building a valuable BoK on web accessibility which helped make our products compliant with global standards● Successful adoption of many new technologies in .NET and Java tech-stacks to resolve key outstanding issues

● Gaining exposure to solid engineering principals in a few mission critical applications for eCollege. (Eg:- a billing system, tool deployment platform)● Getting groomed under effective technical leads with attention to both technical & non-technical aspects● Gaining recognition as a star performer with the talent demonstrated with a rare skill-set.

● Gaining exposure to cutting edge technologies including R&D to support a few strategic moves in the organization