Brad Jayakody

Brad Jayakody

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Vice President of Engineering
London, England, United Kingdom

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Résumé

Jobs verified_user 0% verified
  • Paymentology
    Vice President of Engineering
    Paymentology
    Oct 2025 - Current (1 year 1 month)
    Brought in to strengthen Engineering leadership, define the operating model, and reshape the org for scale.
    Leading 150+ people on a high-volume global payments platform powering the next generation of card issuing.

    Some of us are used to instant transfers and our pay landing in our bank account straight away. This is the kind of infrastructure that helps make that happen, in more countries.

    Highlights so far:

    ● Reduced major incidents (P1 & P2) by 63%
    ● Increased engineering delivery by 56%
    ● Embedded AI into the SDLC
    ● Redesigned the Engineering org, including reporting lines, EM/PM pairing, and the move from Tech Lead people-management to a stronger EM model

    Third fintech.
  • Pleo
    Senior Vice President of Engineering
    Pleo
    Sep 2024 - Jun 2025 (10 months)
    Stepped up to lead Product, Design and Engineering across the Spend Management Domain. 150+ people, representing Engineering at Executive and Board level.

    Highlights:

    ● Helped grow the platform toward €160M+ ARR
    ● Defined the 2025 Engineering Talent Density and Location strategy
    ● Sponsored an AI Innovation team that embedded AI agents into the Pleo platform
    ● Embedded AI into the SDLC with measurable productivity gains
    ● Continuously evolved the Career Competency Framework for ICs and managers
    ● Embedded OKRs to empower teams to act autonomously
  • Pleo
    Vice President of Engineering
    Pleo
    Sep 2022 - Aug 2024 (2 years)
    Pleo's first VP of Engineering. Joined an established 900-person company with 200+ in Engineering to add maturity to an already-ticking org.

    Highlights:

    ● Reduced major incidents by 90%, customer-reported bugs by 50%+
    ● Increased throughput by 144% in year one (with headcount reduced), then 44% more in year two (headcount neutral)
    ● Reduced cycle time from 9.4 days to 2.8 days
    ● Built and executed a 5-year tech strategy; introduced DORA via Swarmia; formed an Architecture Board to build out golden paths and guardrails while letting teams stay empowered
    ● Led the monolith-to-microservices migration using the strangler pattern
    ● Upskilled Engineering Managers and Directors around People, Delivery
  • Motorway 
    Director of Engineering
    Motorway 
    May 2021 - Aug 2022 (1 year 4 months)
    Hyper scale-up fun. Part of the exec team. Grew Engineering from 30 to 150 in under a year, taking Motorway through Series C and D due diligence to unicorn status. Always fun building a highly performant org just below the Dunbar number.

    Highlights:

    ● Helped close Series B ($48M) and Series C ($190M)
    ● Reduced cycle time to under 3 days, with 120+ features released per week
    ● Scaled the platform to 20x load; migrated from Heroku to AWS in under 6 months
    ● Introduced OKRs, security shift-left via Snyk, on-call support
    ● Created the career competency framework (Tech Leads, Staff, Principals, EMs, Heads)
    ● Created the Individual Contributor track (Principal Engineers)
    ● Built nearshore teams
  • Smart Pension
    Head of Engineering
    Smart Pension
    Oct 2018 - Apr 2021 (2 years 7 months)
    "Help make everyone in Engineering successful." That was the job.

    VP-equivalent role leading the Engineering department through hyper growth from 30 to 250+ people, while taking Smart through technical due diligence for Series C and D.

    Highlights:

    ● Helped close Series C (£50M) and Series D (£165M)
    ● 30+ daily releases at high quality
    ● Defect rates and turnover both under 2%
    ● Women in Engineering: 5% to 31%, including 4 of 7 EMs
    ● Built nearshore teams in Warsaw, Krakow, Zagreb and Minsk
    ● Bootcamp-to-Engineer trainee programme
    ● Introduced Product Owners, Agile Leads (Kanban or Scrum by team choice), Squad structure, Communities of Practice
    ● Adopted a No Blame Culture w
  • Expedia Group
    Manager of Technology
    Expedia Group
    Apr 2016 - Oct 2018 (2 years 7 months)
    Software Engineering Manager for Hotels.com. Focusing on the engineering process and people, but still remaining technical to help teams design solutions.

    Started with Hotels for Partners, a white label solution for Hotels.com.

    Direct management of 4 agile teams comprising over 40 people, based in Budapest and Rome. Helped improve velocity by 300%, improved morale by 50% and reduced turnover from 20% to under 5%.

    Helped lead 10+ agile teams come together from around the world (London, Budapest, Rome, Gurgaon, Seattle) to deliv
  • VML
    Technical Director
    VML
    May 2013 - Mar 2016 (2 years 11 months)
    In short, providing technical leadership by helping development teams build amazing software. Managing multiple projects, from initial scoping through to delivery and post live support. Size ranging from simple 1 person, 2 week builds to 20+ devs for 18+ month projects. Designing the technical architecture of large enterprise systems while helping define the architecture roadmap, mainly within Adobe CQ5.6 (Adobe Experience Manager). Optimising and constantly improving software development processes (e.g. introduced Git and BDD). Day to day management of 20+ developers (both on and off shore, internal and 3rd party), mentoring and personal development of team, and still reviewing every line of code that goes out the door.

    Maj
  • Cubic
    Senior Java/J2EE Developer (Contract) - Compensation : £500 a day
    Cubic
    Mar 2011 - Nov 2012 (1 year 9 months)
    • London TFL Oyster Card migration of backend processing (16 million transactions a day) from Forte to Java/J2EE system
    • Sydney Rollout of Opal Smart Card Transportation System

    I got to write code to flip bits in a byte to optimise data streaming. And I still never worked out why parsing a bytestream in java right to left was faster than left to right. It just was, so I kept it.

    2025 - finally got the answer. I asked chatGPT. JVM doesn't have to worry about array bound checks, so you get 20% faster on processing. Okay, AI is sometimes useful.
  • Vodafone
    Senior Java/J2EE Developer (Contract) - Compensation : £500 a day
    Vodafone
    Sep 2009 - Jun 2010 (10 months)
    • JMS system using Tibco Business Works and Business Events, also utilising Datapower to provide messaging capabilities with a throughput of over a thousand messages per second.
  • P
    Senior Java/J2EE Developer (Contract) - Compensation : £500 a day
    Private Individual
    Jun 2009 - Aug 2009 (3 months)
    • Java client to interface with Betfair Webservices to automate placing of bets using arbitrage betting techniques
  • Vodafone Global
    Java/J2EE Technical Team Lead/Architect (Contract) - Compensation : £400 a day
    Vodafone Global
    Dec 2006 - Jun 2009 (2 years 7 months)
    Development of Now+/MyWeb, a new Web Portal for Smart Phones
  • Department of Education Training
    Java/J2EE Technical Team Lead (Contract) - Compensation : $AUD70 an hour
    Department of Education Training
    Sep 2003 - Sep 2006 (3 years 1 month)
    • J2EE Intranet application for State Training Services that handled Risk Managment and all admin functions for State Training Services within DET

    Still the longest job I've ever had, due to my deciding to move to London and setting a date. Back then app servers could kind of handle load, DBs could handle processing data much better, so I designed most of this to run on Oracle. No big data processing in 2003.
  • F
    Engineering Manager - Compensation : $AUD 70k + 20% bonus
    Farmshed
    Jun 2001 - Jun 2003 (2 years 1 month)
    Agricultural portal site.
  • Nielsen
    Senior C++ Analyst Programmer (Contract) - Compensation : $AUD55 an hour
    Nielsen
    Mar 2001 - Jun 2001 (4 months)
    Hired for 4 month contract. Worked defined as 3 months of work, 1 month of testing. I built the feeds parser in 2 days. Then I had to work out what to do with the rest of my time. Ended up building a bunch of new environments, upgrading websites, built a basic CMS, built frontends for command line programs. Ahh coding.
  • Sapient
    Technical Consultant - Compensation : $AUD 60k + 500k in RSU vesting over 4 years
    Sapient
    Aug 1999 - Mar 2001 (1 year 8 months)
    I built a radio player for virgin, back before Spotify was even a dream. I got to use my trigonometry skills to code how a using a mouse around a volume knob would work. Still some of my most elegant code.

    Also did some Y2K stuff for a big bank. And built the website for a now defunct Airline. Where they made me do every release at 10pm at night and had to ftp the files up to their server. So yes, every release I had already had a few beers (heck, I was 21). Only time I've never had a release go wrong.
  • A
    Trainee Analyst Programmer - Compensation : $AUD 35k
    Atlas Travel Technologies
    Jan 1998 - Jan 1999 (1 year 1 month)
    Asp. Not the snake. Web development when it was tables and CSS didn't exist. This company was doing travel sales on the internet. Then decided the Internet was never going to succeed, closed down their web teams, moved me to work on the COBOL backend. Okay, even at 20 years old, I realised the Internet would be around. So I moved to Sydney to write code for the Internet.
  • F
    C++ Developer - Compensation : $AUD 0
    FCS Software
    Jun 1997 - Jan 1998 (8 months)
    Online web game - No REST back then. CGI gateway for the win!

    4 of us built a game, which is pretty much identical to what a lot of mobile games do these days. About 20 years too early!
Education verified_user 0% verified
  • T
    Master of Arts - MA, Gestalt Psychotherapy
    The Gestalt Centre
    Jan 2017 - Aug 2026 (9 years 8 months)
  • Swinburne University of Technology
    Master of Science, Astronomy
    Swinburne University of Technology
    Jan 2010 - Jan 2016 (6 years 1 month)
  • The University of Queensland
    Bachelor of Information Technology
    The University of Queensland
    Jan 1995 - Jan 1998 (3 years 1 month)
Projects (professional or personal) verified_user 0% verified
    Awards verified_user 0% verified
    • J
      VML Team of the Year 2014
      Jan
      The team I led won the VML Team of the Year. An awesome crew on a fantastic project!

      The description reads:

      The Super-Furry Totes Amazeballs Team of the Year Award

      You dug in. You worked like troopers. You picked each other up when they were down. You even made each other herbal teas. When the going got tough, you were all heroes out there. And most of all, you got sh●t done. Bravo.
    • J
      VML Digital Champion
      Jan
      Won the 2015 Digital Life Award at VML London.

      I enjoy pushing how digital can make life even more awesome, from simple hacks to wearable electronics.
    • J
      Employee of the Year VML London
      Jan
      Won the 2014 Employee of the Year award at VML London.

      The description reads:

      The Definitely Democratic, Utterly Unriggable Employee of the Year Award

      This is it. The one they're all after. Some may joke that you received this award out of sympathy, and that may be true. but needless to say, at least one person thought you've done a sterling job this year. And it turns out that person had quite a loud voice. Congratulations to you. Take tomorrow off (Subject to terms and Conditions as stipulated by Management)
    Publications verified_user 0% verified
    • S
      SEO implementation with AngularJS and Adobe CQ 5.6
      How to implement SEO within an AngularJS Single Page Application and integrate with Adobe CQ 5.6
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