Kolitha Warnakulasooriya

Employement Experiance

Aug 2025 – Present

Jan 2022 – May 2025

Pursue research to introduce a dynamic leader election algorithm for an autonomous aerial vehicle system based on cognitive intelligence.
Published three research articles in top-ranked artificial intelligence conferences and journals (AAAI-2023, ICIPRoB, Evolutionary Intelligence)
Engaged as a lead researcher in Drone Systems and AI Laboratory by leading and administrating three core UAV-related research and developed a ROS-based adaptable Python flight framework to operate heterogeneous commercial UAVs such as Tello, Anafi, and Bebop, which can handle a maximum of 15 agents in the cluster.

Innovation office - Sysco Corporation (NYSE: SYY), United States

Aug 2021 – Jan 2022

Appointed as an assistant engineering manager to one of the core development teams of the Sysco Shop e-commerce platform
Worked in an agile/scrum environment, planned sprints, conducted daily standups, and retrospective meetings, and kept meeting minutes
Overlooked team progress in SDLC, feature development process, component testing process, deployment process, feature delivery process, and documentation
Represented the team to the higher management and inter-development team meetings, demonstrated the sprint progress, and status of the feature development process

Innovation office - Sysco Corporation (NYSE: SYY), United States

Dec 2019 – Aug 2021

Promoted as a senior software engineer to one of the Sysco Shop e-commerce platform and Sysco Delivery mobile application
Utilized software engineering expertise to design and develop Sysco Shop e-commerce web application and Sysco Delivery mobile application
Managed, maintained, and overlooked the overall front-end software components, BFF, relevant microservices, and databases in production and nonproduction environments that are responsible to the team
Proficiently troubleshoot simple and complex issues and contributed as an on-call representative for production incidents and zero production incidents were reported related to the responsible components
Enhanced the application component features by accurate development plans, using best software engineering practices, ensuring the testability and the quality of the functionality through unit tests, component tests, integration tests, regression tests, E2E testing, and sea trials, fixing bugs, and improving overall performance and efficiency
Enhanced and assured system reliability by actively monitoring the overall system using Dynatrace and Datadog platforms
Provided guidance and mentorships for junior engineers, provided technical, and cultural support to new engineers in the onboarding process to the organization

Innovation office - Sysco Corporation (NYSE: SYY), United States

Jul 2018 – Nov 2019

Utilized software engineering procedures to develop new features for the Sysco Shop web application and Sysco Delivery mobile application
Implemented readable, well-crafted, maintainable new React and React-Native components with proper state management using Redux and Recoil frameworks according to test driven development.
Implemented RESTful and GraphQL APIs in microservice-based architecture using Spring boot and Node Express frameworks
Ensured the testability of all the software components using unit testing, component testing, integration testing, E2E testing, and sea trials
Collaboratively introduced a machine learning approach to enhance the customer experience of the application and developed a high-performance mockup API generator, which removes expenditure for third-party mock services