Thilina Gunarathne

About Thilina Gunarathne

I’m a Managing Director in KPMG Engineering, helping organizations accelerate AI‑enabled digital transformation—from strategy and reference architecture through delivery of secure, enterprise‑grade platforms. I co‑founded and serve as chief architect of KPMG Blaze (kpmgblaze.com), a GenAI‑enabled modernization solution that streamlines assessment, refactoring, and migration of legacy applications, data and AI workloads. I lead Blaze‑powered modernization programs across industries to reduce timelines and costs while improving reliability, governance, and regulatory compliance.I’m passionate about leading high‑performing teams to build and operate large‑scale solutions in Agentic AI, AI/ML, big data, containers/Kubernetes, IoT, and hybrid/multi‑cloud for Fortune 500 clients in financial services, healthcare, retail, telecom, and sports.Previously, I led KPMG’s HCLS D&A innovations, including a self‑service, regulatory‑compliant cloud data and analytics platform, data warehouse, and reusable solutions. I also led the architecture and development of the KPMG Global AI/NLP platform with deployments across multiple geographies and organizations. I bring 20+ years experience in distributed systems, AI, Cloud & big data. I’ve published two books and 20+ peer‑reviewed research in cloud and distributed computing, was elected a Member of the Apache Software Foundation for my open‑source contributions, and serve as an adjunct professor of business analytics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Experience

1. Managing Director - Engineering

   KPMG US

   Jan 2014 — Present · Knoxville, TN, US

   Managing Director - Engineering : Oct 2021 to CurrentDirector of Data Science & Engineering : Oct 2015 to Sept 2021Lead Data Scientist : Jan 2014 to Sep 2015.(Joined KPMG Data & Analytics through LinkAnalytics acquisition)- Leads KPMG’s Application, Data, and AI Modernization offerings—spanning product R&D and client delivery—with a focus on accelerating outcomes through AI/GenAI- Co‑founder and chief architect of KPMG Blaze (kpmgblaze.com), a GenAI‑enabled modernization toolkit that streamlines assessment, refactoring, and migration of legacy workloads- Drive Blaze‑powered modernization programs across industries, reducing timelines and costs (half the time & half the cost) while improving reliability and governance- Design and implement agentic AI, cloud, container, data analytics, AI/ML, and hybrid solutions and strategies for Fortune 500 and regulated enterprises- Led a team of 170+ onshore & 400+ offshore engineers and data scientists- Established and led a Containerization CoE for a tier‑1 bank, migrating high‑impact applications to Kubernetes and improving release velocity and resilience.[Add metrics]- Delivered secure big data lakes, data warehouses, and AI/ML platforms on cloud and on‑prem, meeting stringent regulatory and security standards- Architected and led the KPMG Global AI/NLP platform with cloud and Kubernetes deployments worldwide- Project lead and chief architect for the KPMG Trusted Cloud Platform (Healthcare & Life Sciences), a compliant D&A platform; led a team of 50+ to build reusable solutions and accelerators- Architected KPMG’s cloud‑hosted Sports Schedule Optimization Engine, scaling computations across hundreds of cores and trillions of schedules per season; deployed with a leading U.S. professional sports league.

Education

• Indiana University Bloomington

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computer Science

  2007 — 2014

• Indiana University Bloomington

  MSc, Computer Science

  2007 — 2009

• University of Moratuwa

  B. Sc. (Eng), Computer Science & Engineering

  2002 — 2006

Skills

• Scalability
• Software Engineering
• C++
• Computer Science
• Architectures
• Java
• Distributed Systems
• Xml
• Parallel Computing
• Data Mining
• Cloud Computing
• Software Development
• Javascript
• C
• Programming
• Apache
• Soa
• Machine Learning
• Open Source
• Algorithms
• Web Services
• Windows Azure
• Grid Computing
• Linux
• Service-Oriented Architecture (Soa)
• Hadoop
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• High Performance Computing
• Big Data
• Mapreduce
• Architecture
• C#