Dasith Wijesiriwardena

💥 Breaking distributed systems, observing them fall apart with OpenTelemetry, then teaching AI agents to fix them. 🧑‍💻 Principal Software Engineer @ Microsoft. 📍 Melbourne. Opinions my own, bugs probably also mine.

I’ve spent 20+ years building software, from low-level systems to cloud-native distributed architectures. These days I’m deep in the world of AI agents, exploring how we secure them, authenticate them, and collaborate with them to build better software. This blog covers that journey along with distributed systems, .NET, and all things engineering.

I am a Principal Software Engineer in Microsoft’s Forward Deployed Engineering practice. I work with enterprise customers across the Asia-Pacific region, Microsoft product teams, and open-source communities to engineer production AI and distributed systems.

I have spent more than 20 years building software, from native-language tools and enterprise applications to cloud-native platforms. Distributed systems are the thread running through that work. I care about good design, manageable codebases, observability, security, and helping teams carry what we build into production.

What I am working on

My attention is currently on the engineering challenges behind agentic systems:

  • Designing and building production-ready GenAI and LLM-based solutions
  • Developing agentic architectures that can operate reliably at enterprise scale
  • Exploring identity and security patterns for agents, including MCP and A2A
  • Designing observable AI systems with OpenTelemetry and contributing to GenAI semantic conventions
  • Improving software supply-chain security for customers and open-source projects
  • Running intelligent systems at the edge with Kubernetes and GitOps

This work builds on years spent designing cloud-native and event-driven systems, modernising applications, and helping teams adopt DevOps and DevSecOps practices.

How I got here

I started developing software professionally in 2004 while pursuing higher education. After completing my master’s degree at Swinburne University of Technology in 2009, I joined Luxton Plant and led the development of an ERP platform for the hire, service, and sale of earth-moving equipment.

I later joined Whirlwind Print, where I worked on B2B integration, messaging, and the gradual replacement of a monolithic system. From there I moved into consulting at Readify, which became Telstra Purple after its acquisition by Telstra. I worked with teams across Australia on solution architecture, cloud adoption, application modernisation, delivery practices, and technical leadership.

I joined Microsoft Consulting Services as a Senior Consultant in 2021. In 2022, I moved to Commercial Software Engineering as a Senior Software Engineer, working with customers on significant technical challenges and production-ready solutions. In 2025, I became a Principal Software Engineer in Forward Deployed Engineering, with a focus on AI engineering.

Community

I enjoy participating in the engineering community, listening to war stories from the tech trenches, and sharing what I have learned. You can find my talks on my speaker profile, my open-source work on GitHub, and my longer-form writing throughout this site.

For more about my early days as a developer, read my first blog post.

Most of my friends still do not have the slightest idea what I actually do. Their best guess is something close to this:

Technology

My day-to-day stack usually includes:

  • .NET, ASP.NET Core, Python, TypeScript, and Go
  • Azure, AWS, and edge platforms
  • PaaS, serverless architectures, containers, and Kubernetes
  • OpenTelemetry, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and GitOps
  • Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and development containers

CV

For a complete overview of my experience, education, and technical background, view my resume.

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