Janaka
Premathilaka

Senior Java Engineer & Solution Architect

I write Java for banks — and bring AI inside the perimeter.
Mission-critical, regulated, audited, and not allowed to fall over. 22+ years across UBS, Credit Suisse, the European Commission and Union Bank of Colombo.

Zug, Switzerland 🇨🇭 Swiss Permit C German B1 ↗ Claude Code · Anthropic-trained 2026 2 months’ notice On-call (Pikett): yes AssetCare · live on Kubernetes ↗
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Portrait photo of Janaka Premathilaka
ZUG · SWITZERLAND
22+years of production Java
6apps owned through the CS–UBS merger
≈20%FX platform latency cut
3+1banks + the EU served

The Perimeter

AI inside the bank, safely.

Outside the bank, AI moves fast. Inside, every system is regulated, audited and 20 years deep. Very few engineers work comfortably on both sides of that wall. I work in the gate.

Outside

Public AI

  • frontier models
  • LLM APIs
  • open weights
The Gate
risk review
guardrails
evals · audit

Inside the bank

A 20-year Java estate

  • golden-source data
  • Oracle · Kafka · Spring
  • on-call · Pikett · 2 am

My job is the gate: LLM and agentic-RAG automation that passes a risk review and still works on Monday morning, integrated with existing Java services. And when the data can’t go to the model, the model comes to the data — local Llama 3 inference inside the perimeter.

How I work

I’m not the loudest person in the room. I’m the one who’s still there when things go wrong at 2 am, the one who finishes what they said they’d finish, and the one who mentors the junior dev instead of rewriting their code in silence.

Quiet leadership · finished work · no shortcuts

Experience

22 years, production-grade.

Independent work

The latest stack, live in production.

AssetCare · assetcare.janaka.me · source on request · September 2026

A complete asset-maintenance application I took from architecture to a live Kubernetes deployment in my own time: Angular 22 in front of Spring Boot 4.1 on Java 25, PostgreSQL 18 with Liquibase, Keycloak 26 for identity, S3-compatible object storage, OpenTelemetry instrumentation with a Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and Tempo stack, tests at every level (Testcontainers, ArchUnit, Playwright, k6), signed multi-arch images released through GitHub Actions, a Helm chart on K3s, and a Hetzner Cloud server created from Terraform. AI accelerated the engineering; architecture, security and verification stayed with me.

Java 25Spring Boot 4.1Spring Security 7 · OAuth2 / OIDCHibernate 7PostgreSQL 18LiquibaseAngular 22Keycloak 26MinIODocker · multi-archKubernetes (K3s)HelmTerraformTraefik · cert-managerGitHub ActionsOpenTelemetryPrometheus · GrafanaLoki · TempoTestcontainersArchUnitPlaywrightk6Trivy · cosign · SBOM

BlitzMath · bm.janaka.me · October 2026

A live maths game for classrooms and families, on a different stack from AssetCare by design: a React 19 and TypeScript progressive web app on Cloudflare Workers, with one Durable Object per game room as the server-side referee for questions, clock and scores over WebSockets. No database and no accounts. The game core is pure TypeScript, shared by server and browser and covered by unit tests, and a full live game is played end to end by robot players after each deploy. English, German, French and Italian.

TypeScriptReact 19ViteCloudflare WorkersDurable ObjectsWebSocketsPWA · offlineVitest

Also open source: MP3 Alarm Clock, a single-file Python desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux (MIT).

Skills

The stack I reach for.

Languages

Java 17 → 25 (LTS)SQLTypeScript 6Python

AI / LLM engineering

LangChainLlamaIndexRAG / CAGagentic workflows · n8nlocal LLMs · Llama 3prompt & parameter tuningMCP servers & clientsClaude Code · sub-agents · skills · hooksOpenAI Codexevals · guardrails

Architecture

microservicessolution architectureevent-driven · KafkamultithreadingGraphQLRESTclean architecture · ArchUnitPostgreSQL 18 · OracleOAuth2 / OIDC · Keycloak

Frameworks

Spring Boot 4.1 · Spring Framework 7Spring Security 7Hibernate 7LiquibaseAngular 22 · Signals · MaterialReact

DevOps & cloud

Kubernetes / OpenShift / K3sHelmTerraformDocker · multi-archJenkinsGitHub ActionsOpenTelemetryPrometheus · GrafanaLoki · TempoSplunk

Testing & agile

TDDJUnitMockitoTestcontainersArchUnitPlaywrightk6TrivyCucumberJiraScrum / SAFe

Java 17, Kafka, Oracle and OpenShift are what I run at the bank. Java 25, Spring Boot 4.1, Angular 22, PostgreSQL 18, Helm, Terraform and the OpenTelemetry stack are what I run in AssetCare.

Education, Certifications & Training

Credentials.

BSc — Computer Science, Statistics & Mathematics

University of Sri Jayewardenepura · 1999 — 2004

Certifications

  • Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA)architect credential held since 2006 · plus SCJP, SCBCD, SCWCD
  • CKA — Certified Kubernetes AdministratorThe Linux Foundation / CNCF · 2024
  • Claude Certified Architect — Professional (Anthropic)exam preparation · 2026
  • Spring Certified Professionalin progress · 2026

Anthropic Claude Academy

Official Anthropic training · completed August — September 2026

  • Claude Code 101completed · badge · August 2026
  • Claude Code in Actioncompleted · badge · August 2026
  • AI Fluency: Framework & Foundationscompleted · September 2026
  • AI Fluency for Builderscompleted · 2026
  • AI Fluency for educators · AI Fluency for studentscompleted · 2026
  • Introduction to agent skills (Claude Code)completed · September 2026
  • Introduction to Model Context Protocolcompleted · September 2026 · certificate
  • Model Context Protocol: Advanced Topicscompleted · 17 September 2026 · certificate · verify

Recent courses

  • The Complete Agentic AI Engineering CourseEd Donner · completed September 2025
  • AI Automation: Build LLM Apps & AI Agents with n8n & APIscompleted
  • Helm 3 — Package Manager for Kubernetescompleted
  • Ready for Production with Spring Boot Actuatorcompleted
  • AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals — exam preparationcompleted 2025

Languages

Spoken languages.

EnglishFull professional · C1/C2
GermanIntermediate · B1 ↗ improving
SinhalaNative
French & DutchBasic knowledge

Contact

My inbox is open.

If banking-grade engineering plus practical AI is the problem on your desk — in Switzerland, or remote/hybrid across Europe — let’s talk.

PS — Schreiben Sie mir gerne auch auf Deutsch. Ich antworte auf Deutsch und übe dabei.

Excellent references from UBS, Credit Suisse and the European Commission available on request. Seven written recommendations from colleagues, 2011 to 2026: the recommendation map, shared on request.

© Janaka Premathilaka · Zug 🇨🇭 built by hand — no frameworks, no build step. view source.