Don Athalage

Platform Engineer
dknathalage@gmail.com GitHub LinkedIn
AWS | GCP | Kubernetes | Terraform | CI/CD

About

Platform Engineer specializing in enterprise-scale AWS and GCP infrastructure with 3+ years of experience designing multi-account governance frameworks and infrastructure as code solutions. Expert in establishing CI/CD patterns, hybrid cloud authentication, and Kubernetes deployments that enable development teams to ship faster and more securely. Proven ability to modernize legacy systems, implement security controls at scale, and serve as a trusted technical advisor across the organization.

Experience

AWS Cloud Platforms Engineer, ANZ Banking Group, Melbourne — 2025 — Present
  • Architect and implement SCPs and Organizational Units structure governing multi-account AWS environment
  • Provide incident response and remediation for AWS infrastructure issues
  • Refactor legacy platform code to modern architectural patterns
GCP Cloud Platforms Engineer, ANZ Banking Group, Melbourne — 2024 — 2025
  • Design standardized CI/CD patterns adopted across the organization improving developer efficiency
  • Architect hybrid cloud authentication integrating GCP Identity Federation with on-premise Active Directory
  • Deploy large-scale Kubernetes infrastructure using GKE Autopilot with FluxCD for continuous delivery
  • Establish release engineering standards enabling teams to deploy to production seamlessly
  • Develop and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform
Solutions Architect (Cloud COE), ANZ Banking Group, Melbourne — 2022 — 2024
  • Lead cloud migration architecture for enterprise applications ensuring security and best practices
  • Conduct in-depth application assessments to identify cloud migration candidates
  • Served as trusted technical advisor for cloud-native applications on container platforms
  • Created library of pre-approved reference architectures accelerating cloud adoption
  • Evangelized cloud-native design patterns across the organization
Research Assistant, Deakin University, Melbourne — 2021 — 2022
  • Conducted research on probabilistic and ML models for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction
  • Developed end-to-end NLP pipeline for data cleaning, preprocessing, entity and relation extraction

Projects

cinder
Low-ceremony CLI for deploying Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run Jobs, and Cloud SQL from one declarative file.
Go, GCP, Terraform, Cloud Run
Network Resource Optimisation
Deployed virtual 5G network using Kubernetes, KNative, UERANSIM and free5GC. Performance testing on resource efficiency using KNative for dynamic network function resource management.
KNative, Kubernetes, Go, free5GC
Reinforcement Learning for 5G
Researched 5G New Radio specifications on Network Function Virtualization. Developed reinforcement learning algorithms for network slicing optimization.
Python, Simulation, Reinforcement Learning

Skills

Cloud Platforms
AWS, GCP, Multi-account Governance, IAM, Organizations
IaC
Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK
Containers
Kubernetes, Docker, GKE, EKS, FluxCD, Helm
CI/CD
GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, CodePipeline, GitOps
Languages
Go, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Bash
Observability
CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Logging

Education

Bachelor of Software Engineering (First Class Honours) — Deakin University, 2023 • WAM 85.5%

Certifications

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — Professional — Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Developer — Associate — Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate — Amazon Web Services
GCP Associate Cloud Engineer — Google Cloud