Sivantha Paranavithana · Senior Engineering Lead
I build teams
that build
systems that scale.
Senior engineering lead with 5+ years of experience leading distributed engineering teams — remote and on-site — defining technical architecture, and building engineering culture across fast-moving product organizations.
13.5M
Years of experience building and leading engineering teams
Projects delivered across organizations, from startups to enterprise
Client partnerships across Sri Lanka, Australia, USA, Singapore, Indonesia, and Nepal
Open source contributions on GitHub
Flagship Work
AWS Microservices Migration
Inherited a monolithic EC2 system where a single database deadlock could take the entire platform offline. Redesigned the full infrastructure using AWS CDK — migrating to ECS Fargate microservices with isolated service boundaries, eliminating platform-wide outages, achieving near-100% uptime, and cutting monthly cloud costs by 49%. Designed for distributed team workflows with infrastructure-as-code, automated rollbacks, and per-service observability via CloudWatch.
Dinetap Payments
Architected and led a team of 7 engineers to build a payment platform now processing SGD 13.5M+ per month across card, digital wallet, and physical POS terminal surfaces. Engineered for high-concurrency reliability during restaurant peak hours — SQS-backed webhook processing ensures no payment event is lost under load. Covers Stripe, Adyen (with terminal support), WooCommerce, and Airwallex, with PCI-compliant data handling across all surfaces.
Dinetap App
Architected and led a cross-functional team of 6 engineers to deliver the flagship consumer dining app end-to-end. Set API contracts, data models, and release cadence from day one — with documentation-first workflows enabling async delivery across a distributed team. Covers restaurant discovery, real-time ordering, integrated payments, and a cashback rewards system, built on React Native Expo with AWS ECS Fargate for high availability.
Engineering Quality Programme
Built the engineering quality infrastructure to support a distributed team shipping across multiple product streams simultaneously. Eliminated all manual release steps, enabling daily autonomous deployments across every web, API, mobile, and microservice repository. Pipelines include AI-assisted code review, SonarQube security scanning, and automated regression checks — so engineers ship confidently without synchronous sign-off.
Serving as the architect and tech lead for a 4-engineer team, I designed and built this full-stack administration dashboard from the ground up for Dinetap's Singapore and Australian operations. The platform provides centralized control over restaurant management, user permissions, and real-time analytics, covering the complete system from data models and API design through to the frontend.
Designed for restaurant owners across Dinetap's Singapore and Australian network, this operations portal was architected and led by me with a team of 5 engineers. Delivers inventory tracking, staff management, financial reporting, and performance analytics through customizable dashboards, built from database schema design through to the React frontend.
A React Native self-service kiosk application deployed across Dinetap restaurant locations in Singapore, built as part of a 5-engineer team. Optimized for large-format touchscreens with multi-language support and seamless integration with Stripe payment terminals. Engineered for unattended, always-on deployment with resilient offline error recovery.
The core engineering challenge here was building a cloud-based POS that works reliably offline across multiple simultaneous devices in live restaurant environments. I led a team of 6 engineers through the full delivery for Dinetap's Singapore and Australian operations, designing the offline-first data model, multi-device sync conflict resolution strategy, and zero-downtime cloud infrastructure from the ground up.
Part of the 7-engineer payments team at Dinetap, I built Stripe gateway integration spanning web, mobile, and physical terminal surfaces across the Singapore markets. Implemented SQS-backed webhook event handling, refund flows, and detailed transaction history. This work contributes to a payments platform processing over SGD 13.5M per month.
A mobile insurance companion app delivered for LOLC's Sri Lankan customer base as part of a 4-engineer team. Gives policyholders a single place to manage policies, submit claims, make payments, store documents, and communicate directly with agents via real-time notifications. Responsible for the full mobile application build.
Journey
- →Led a distributed engineering team of 8 across 5+ concurrent product streams — running regular 1:1s, annual performance reviews, and structured growth plans that measurably progressed every engineer in the organization.
- →Built a company-wide culture of continuous learning and drove all engineering hiring: introduced knowledge-sharing sessions, embedded tracking of new tools and trends into team rituals, and designed structured onboarding programs with growth plans and knowledge transfer tracks for each new hire.
- →Owned the full AWS cloud architecture using CDK (ECS Fargate, RDS/Aurora, VPC, API Gateway, SQS, Lambda, WAF, EventBridge, and CloudWatch), reducing monthly infrastructure costs by over 49% through a serverless architecture with auto-scaling services and databases.
- →Drove the migration from a monolithic EC2 system to ECS Fargate microservices, eliminating platform-wide outages caused by database deadlocks and resource exhaustion, and achieving near-100% uptime with failures contained to individual services.
- →Architected and led delivery of the Dinetap App (React Native Expo, team of 6) and Dinetap Admin Panel (Next.js, team of 4): flagship consumer dining app and the centralized operations dashboard for all Dinetap restaurants.
- →Established an engineering quality programme enabling daily autonomous deployments across all repositories — GitHub Actions CI/CD with AI-assisted code review and SonarQube security scanning, eliminating all manual release gates and synchronous sign-off for routine deploys.
- →Partnered with product and business stakeholders to translate ambiguous goals into sequenced engineering plans, communicating trade-offs and managing delivery expectations across concurrent work streams.
- →Architected and led delivery of Dinetap POS (React Native, team of 6): an offline-first, cloud-synced point-of-sale system with multi-device conflict resolution and zero-downtime deployment.
- →Designed and shipped Dinetap BackOffice (React + Vite, team of 5): restaurant operations portal covering inventory, staff management, financial reporting, and analytics dashboards.
- →Drove technical decision-making across Dinetap Consumer Web, Merchant App, and Kiosk, setting system architecture, API contracts, and data models for each platform end-to-end.
- →Delivered Adyen and Stripe payment integrations with physical terminal support (team of 7), built a WooCommerce PHP payment plugin, and is currently leading the Airwallex integration, with the platform now processing over SGD 13.5M per month.
- →Established the foundational engineering conventions adopted across the whole organization (branching strategy, code review standards, deployment workflows, and incident response practices) that became the scaffolding for all later team and process scaling.
- →Ran knowledge transfer sessions and mentored engineers on technical and professional growth; initiated and led internal tech talks on React, mobile architecture, and cloud patterns.
- →Designed and built BaseNeo, a MEAN stack ERP framework from scratch, directing a small team of engineers; the platform now underpins 20+ production applications across the company's portfolio.
- →Served as tech lead across ArchivEL (document management with OCR and workflow automation), CredenEL (SSO/MFA/RBAC identity platform), LOLC Customer Portal (20K+ downloads on mobile), and Kelzey CMS, owning architecture, delivery, and direct client engagement on each.
- →Ran structured knowledge transfer and mentoring programmes that measurably upskilled engineers across the team; owned full project lifecycle concurrently across multiple client engagements.
- →Contributed to XLife (React Native), XL Axiata's 100K+ download employee super-app, within a cross-functional team spanning Sri Lanka and Indonesia; delivered knowledge transfer sessions on React that directly upskilled junior engineers across the international team.
- →Built and shipped Writer Watch / ReaderScout (React Chrome extension) as sole developer, scoped, designed, and delivered independently.
- →Built Angular SPAs for Ncell Gifting Platform, Ncell Payment Gateway, and Genie Admin Portal (Dialog Axiata), operating across three enterprise client projects simultaneously.
Stack & Expertise
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- Java
- React Native
- Expo
- React.js
- Next.js
- Angular
- Redux
- Zustand
- Node.js
- Express
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Supabase
- AWS CDK
- ECS Fargate
- Lambda
- RDS / Aurora
- API Gateway
- SQS
- CloudWatch
- WAF
- VPC
- GitHub Actions
- Docker
- NGINX
- Sentry
- SonarQube
- Expo EAS
- Team Leadership
- Hiring & Onboarding
- Engineering Mentoring
- Async Communication
- Documentation-First Workflows
- Distributed Team Coordination
- Agile / Scrum
- Stakeholder Management
- Code Review