The arc
An experienced builder, choosing to go hands-on.
Gayan Kalinga — VP, FinTech & Operations at Arimac, visiting supervisor at IIT Sri Lanka, and a daily-committing engineer. Based in the UK.
2008–2016
Inside the bank
Eight years at People’s Bank of Sri Lanka in operational banking and then full-time retail lending and collections — general ledgers, reconciliation, an LKR 1bn loan portfolio, recovery work on LKR 50M a month in non-performing assets. I was the user before I ever built for the user.
2016–2022
Digitising the bank
Moved into Digital Transformation and shipped the bank’s retail digital stack: Peoples Pay to a million users, LankaQR and JustPay to fifty thousand merchants, eKYC that cut onboarding by 60%, and the $5M RLOS lending rollout — training over a thousand colleagues along the way.
2022–now
Building the builders
At Arimac, grew a fintech practice from 8 to 65+ engineers and 1 to 14 products across South Asia and MENA — wallets, BNPL, payment aggregation, the Sherlock AI risk platform — staying hands-on with architecture, releases and DevOps. Alongside: a BEng (First Class, Gold Medal) and an MSc with Distinction.
now
Back to building
The degrees reminded me what I enjoy most: writing the software myself. I code daily — Swift and SwiftUI for iOS, Python for ML, Go for backends — and I’m building Ledger in the open. Sixteen years of domain depth, deliberately pointed back at the keyboard.
Working with me
I consult on delivery and project management, solution & infrastructure architecture, developer experience, DevSecOps, DevOps automation, and AI engineering in regulated environments — and I build iOS and backend software daily. The fastest way to reach me is X.