Chamindra de Silva

AI-native Solutions Architect · GenAI Governance Leader · Humanitarian Open Source & InnerSource Pioneer

About

About me

I am a solution architect and technical product lead working in financial-services technology in London. My current interests include high-performance architecture, responsible adoption of AI, InnerSource, DevOps and open source.

I studied Engineering and Computer Science at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Over the past two decades I have worked in engineering, architecture and product roles, including at Citi and Virtusa.

Current work

My work at Citi focuses on architecture and engineering in a regulated environment. My FINOS contributions are community work: collaborating on practical approaches to InnerSource and AI governance with people from across the financial-services industry.

Open source and humanitarian technology

I became involved in free and open source software in Sri Lanka and helped lead the early development of the Sahana disaster-management project following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Sahana grew through the work of a broad international community and has been used in humanitarian responses around the world.

Earlier in my career I contributed to or worked with initiatives including the Lanka Software Foundation, Apache, UNDP IOSN, the Open Source Initiative, the W3C Emergency Information Interoperability Framework and the Humanitarian FOSS project. These are part of my background rather than a list of current memberships.

Sahana received the Free Software Foundation’s 2006 Award for Projects of Social Benefit. I was fortunate to be one of many people involved in the project and community behind that recognition.

Writing and research

I have written and co-authored work on open source, humanitarian software, InnerSource and sustainability. This includes:

  • Software Development: An Open Source Approach, co-authored with colleagues from the Sahana community
  • Articles and case studies published through CACM, IDRC, UN ESCAP, CMI and other organisations
  • Measuring InnerSource Value, co-authored with Daniel Izquierdo-Cortázar and published in the proceedings of the 2025 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. Daniel presented the work at that conference.

The Publications & Presentations page contains a fuller list.

Values

  • I strive to be a Christian.
  • I value humility, service and treating people with respect.
  • I believe technology should be open to scrutiny and accountable for its effects.
  • I care about sustainable engineering and technology that serves communities.

Earlier roles

Previous roles have included VP Engineering at Virtusa, CTO of the Sahana Foundation, Head of Platforms at xLabs, Acting Executive Director of the Lanka Software Foundation and Co-Chair of the W3C EIIF Incubator Group.

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