v2026.current · 2026 — Present
Head of Quality Engineering & Release Management
Leading quality strategy, release governance, automation and engineering excellence across global technology teams.
AVAILABLE FOR ADVISORY & SPEAKING
Quality isn't tested in. It's engineered in.
Janith Gunasekara — Head of Quality Engineering & Release Management, GTN Technologies
Engineering executive with 20+ years of experience building high-performing software delivery organizations. I help businesses accelerate innovation through Quality Engineering, Release Engineering, DevOps, AI, and engineering excellence.
VERIFIED
career_summary.log
YEARS EXPERIENCE
ENGINEERS LED
COUNTRIES
INDUSTRIES
QUALITY TRANSFORMATION
CONFERENCE SPEAKER
ENGINEERING THOUGHT LEADER
ENTERPRISE SCALE
01 / About
Built for scale. Tested for trust.
Janith Gunasekara is a Quality Engineering and Technology Leader with 20+ years of experience helping organizations deliver high-quality software at scale. Across telecommunications, healthcare, e-commerce, retail, logistics, food services and financial technology, he's led enterprise-wide quality transformation initiatives that turned traditional QA functions into modern engineering disciplines.
As Head of Quality & Release Engineering at GTN Technologies, Janith drives quality strategy, release governance, automation, performance engineering, DevOps practices and engineering excellence across global technology teams — embedding quality throughout the SDLC while enabling rapid, reliable delivery.
At Circles.Life, Janith drove enterprise quality transformation across a global telco-tech platform — building automation and performance engineering capability behind multiple MVNO launches across markets. At Sysco LABS, he built and scaled quality engineering practices supporting large-scale, multi-billion-dollar supply chain and logistics platforms. Earlier leadership roles at Velou Inc and Cambio Healthcare Systems saw him build high-performing engineering organizations and introduce automation and continuous delivery at enterprise scale — leading global teams of 500+ engineers along the way.
He's also an active thought leader, conference speaker, and mentor, sharing insights on Quality Engineering, DevOps, AI in software engineering, and engineering leadership.
"Quality is not a testing activity — it is an engineering culture."
Industry Exposure
FinTech
Telecom
Healthcare
Retail
E-commerce
Logistics
Food Services
Supply Chain
SaaS
CRM
Enterprise Software
Global Reach
North America
Europe
Asia-Pacific
02 / Impact
Leadership Impact
Six areas where quality engineering leadership translates into real outcomes.
Engineering Excellence
Building high-performing engineering organizations.
Quality Transformation
Embedding quality across the SDLC.
People & Leadership
Growing future engineering leaders.
Delivery Excellence
Accelerating reliable software delivery.
Innovation & Technology
Driving AI-powered engineering modernization.
Business Value
Enabling measurable business outcomes.
03 / Principles
What guides the work
Four ideas that shape how quality engineering gets done.
$ engineering_principles
04 / Experience
Experience
Two decades of roles, each one shipping more scale and more responsibility than the last.
v2025 · 2025 — 2026
Senior Director, Quality Engineering
Led quality engineering strategy and automation transformation, scaling QA into a modern engineering discipline.
v2022 · 2022 — 2025
Head of Quality Engineering
Drove enterprise quality transformation across a global telco-tech platform, building automation and performance engineering capability.
v2019 · 2019 — 2022
Head of Quality Engineering
Built and scaled quality engineering practices supporting large-scale supply chain and logistics platforms.
v2016 · 2016 — 2019
Head of Quality Engineering
First Head/Director-level role — modernized testing practices and introduced enterprise automation for healthcare software products.
v2015 · 2015 — 2016
Quality Engineering Lead
Netstarter
v2006 · 2006 — 2015
Quality Engineer → Senior QE Roles
Nine formative years building deep technical foundations in test engineering and automation.
05 / Industry Leadership
Contributions to the QE community
Roles, talks, and writing shared with the broader quality engineering community — separate from full-time employment.
Industry Leadership Roles
Speaking & Publications
Conferences & MeetupsSPEAKER
✓🇱🇰Colombo Agile Conference
✓🇱🇰Colombo Quality Engineering Conference
✓🇮🇳International Software Testing Conference — India
✓🇸🇬QA Financial & Commerce Forum — Singapore
✓🇦🇺Industry Talk — AIIHE, Australia
✓🇱🇰Colombo Selenium Meetups
✓🇱🇰University Guest Sessions
✓🇱🇰🇸🇬Panel Discussions
Publication2019
"Expectations of Software Engineers in Sri Lanka With Reference to Software Industry"
Co-authored · International Journal of Academic Information Systems Research (IJAISR), Vol. 3, Issue 11 · November 2019
Articles
Why Shift Left Looks Great on Slides—but Struggles in Reality
Why shift-left testing often fails in practice despite sounding right in theory, and what it actually takes to make it work.
Shifting Right in Software Development: A Leadership Perspective on Continuous Improvement
Why quality doesn't end at release — using production signals and monitoring to drive continuous improvement.
Building a Robust Quality Engineering Competency Framework
A practical framework for building and assessing QE capability across an engineering organization.
Balancing Speed and Quality in Software Engineering: Achieving Faster Delivery Without Compromising Quality
How to ship faster without trading away quality, using automation and smarter risk-based testing.
From Bottlenecks to Breakthroughs: The Journey from Manual Testing to Automation
The real-world journey of transforming a manual-testing-heavy team into an automation-driven one.
06 / Key Achievements
What shipped, what changed
TRANSFORMATION
Manual → Modern QE
Modernized organizations from manual, testing-driven QA to automation and CI/CD-driven quality engineering practices.
TELECOM
Multi-MVNO Launches
Successfully launched and supported multiple MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) end-to-end.
SCALE
Multi-Billion-Dollar Products
Proven quality leadership on platforms supporting multi-billion-dollar product portfolios.
07 / Skills
Technical Leadership
Run across two decades. All passing.
✓Enterprise Quality Strategy
✓Quality Governance
✓Test Architecture & Planning
✓Risk-Based / Shift-Left Testing
✓Quality Metrics & Maturity Assessment
✓Root Cause Analysis
✓Engineering Excellence Programs
✓Automation Framework Design
✓Selenium · Playwright · Cypress
✓Appium (Mobile Automation)
✓RestAssured / API Automation
✓Cucumber / BDD
✓Data-Driven & Keyword Frameworks
✓Cross-Browser Testing
✓Load, Stress & Spike Testing
✓Scalability & Capacity Planning
✓JMeter · k6 · LoadRunner
✓Bottleneck Analysis
✓Performance Monitoring
✓Benchmarking
✓CI/CD Pipeline Design
✓GitLab CI · GitHub Actions · Jenkins
✓Release & Environment Management
✓Canary & Blue-Green Deployment
✓Feature Flags / Trunk-Based Dev
✓Deployment Automation
✓Kubernetes · Docker
✓Agile · Scrum · Kanban · SAFe
✓Sprint & Release Planning
✓Backlog Grooming
✓Acceptance Criteria Review
✓Cross-functional Facilitation
✓AI-Assisted Testing
✓AI Test Case Generation
✓Prompt Engineering for QE
✓Engineering Productivity / DORA Metrics
✓AI Governance in Engineering
08 / Contact
Let's ship something reliable.
Available for executive advisory, conference speaking, engineering transformation, and technology leadership discussions.