Tharindu Kalhara

Experience

Work history

From an early start at OREL IT to lecturing, DevRel engineering, and leading one of Sri Lanka's largest student tech events.

  1. Cloud & DevOps Platforms Engineer Intern

    N-able
    Apr 2026 – Present · Colombo

  2. Lecturer

    IDET – Institute of Digital Engineering Technology
    Apr 2026 – Present · Sri Lanka

    CloudOps, Cloud Computing and AWS Lecturer at IDET.

  3. DevRel Engineer

    CertDirectory.io
    Dec 2025 – Present · United Kingdom (remote)

    Teaching as an Engineer while delivering as a DevRel to bridge the gap between skills & CertDirectory's platform, globally.

    • Conducted workshops, meetups, and sessions
    • Attended community events and spoke
    • Initiated client relationships and business partnerships
    • Helped with technical infrastructure documentation and training
    • Company outreach and marketing

  4. Lecturer

    Ideacade – Institute of Skills to Income
    Feb 2026 – Mar 2026

    Conducted a course program on IT & GenAI.

  5. Chairperson, CryptX 1.0 (CTF | Hackathon | Designathon)

    ICTS – Information and Communication Technology Society
    Jan 2025 – Feb 2025

    Preceded by 6 months as a general Member (Sep 2024 – Feb 2025).

  6. Event Chair, Japura CryptX 1.0

    University of Sri Jayewardenepura
    Jan 2025 – Feb 2025

    Led Sri Lanka's pioneering solo-day Hackathon, Designathon, and Capture the Flag (CTF) competition, the first-ever CTF hosted by the University of Sri Jayewardenepura.

    • 350+ applications received, 160+ finalists from 20+ universities across Sri Lanka
    • 500+ participants across Hackathon, Designathon, and CTF tracks
    • Led a 75+ person organizing committee in under a month, overseeing budget, logistics, and technical execution

  7. Associate

    OREL IT
    Apr 2022 – Jun 2023 · Galle

    Began this role right after A/Ls, before entering university (1.5 years full-time).

    • Contributed to key projects including RDLF, RDLF8H, and RDLFV2
    • Maintained project quality above 95% while exceeding monthly performance targets by over 200%

Certifications

Certifications

AWS Cloud PractitionerAWS Knowledge: Cloud EssentialsAZ-900: Azure FundamentalsLFS101: Introduction to LinuxLFS158: Introduction to KubernetesGitHub FoundationsOWASP Security FundamentalsServer-side Web ProgrammingFront-End Web DevelopmentPython For Beginners

Collaborations

Collaborations & partnerships

CertDirectory.io

Globally recognized certification platform with a CNCF partnership, DevRel engineering collaboration.

Team-BISHOP

Affiliated technical community/organization.

KubePredict

Affiliated technical community/organization.

Projects

Case studies

Five proof-of-concept builds covering infrastructure as code, GitOps, Kubernetes, and observability, start to finish.

FlagshipPlanned
GitOps Platform on EKS
Terraform-provisioned EKS with GitOps deploys via ArgoCD and Grafana observability on top.
TerraformAWS EKSArgoCDKubernetes
Planned
Zero-Downtime Deploy Pipeline
Blue/green or canary deploys with automatic rollback triggered by live error-rate alerts.
Argo RolloutsAWS CodeDeployKubernetesPrometheus
Planned
Full Observability Stack for a Sample App
Multi-service app instrumented with OpenTelemetry, Grafana dashboards, alerting rules, and an incident runbook.
OpenTelemetryGrafanaPrometheusAlertmanager
Planned
Reusable Terraform Module Library
Versioned, tested Terraform modules for VPC/EKS/RDS with policy guardrails enforced in CI.
TerraformTerratestCheckovOPA
Planned
Cost-Aware Autoscaling Cluster
EKS with Karpenter autoscaling, load-tested with k6, and a dashboard correlating cost against load.
AWS EKSKarpenterk6Grafana