Founding Engineer. Building a reliability layer for AI agents that catches the silent failures monitoring misses, then ships back a verified fix teams can trust.
2026–Present
Founding Engineer · PhD in AI · Co-Founder
Chamath
Palihawadana
Dr. Chamath
Palihawadana
Founding Engineer with a PhD in AI and over a decade spent turning ideas into products people rely on, from federated-learning research to building Glassray.
Founding Engineer building Glassray, the reliability layer for AI agents, after leading applied AI at Vera. Over ten years shipping efficient, scalable products from first concept to production.
PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Robert Gordon University, focused on Federated Learning. I study how machines can learn from data without ever centralising it.
Read as
Now building
Glassray, Founding Engineer
A reliability layer for AI agents that catches the silent failures monitoring misses, then ships back a verified fix teams can trust.
Notable research
FedSim
Similarity-guided model aggregation for Federated Learning. Neurocomputing 483.
Glassray
Current role
Founding Engineer, building the reliability layer for AI agents
2026–Present
Doctorate
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Federated Learning
Robert Gordon University, 2024. A core contributor to iSee (Explainable AI) and CloodCBR, the world's first microservices-based Case-Based Reasoning framework.
How I Build
Multi-Agent Systems
LangGraph orchestration with configurable agents and an MCP server for tool access.
Retrieval & RAG
Grounding LLMs in private knowledge with retrieval pipelines built for accuracy.
Evaluation & Observability
Eval pipelines, tracing, and regression testing to keep agents reliable in production.
Scalable Backends
Microservices on AWS serving 50,000+ users and 50TB of monthly traffic.
Payments & Integrations
Five payment gateways processing Rs 200M, plus Slack and Teams applications.
Mobile Engineering
React and React Native products in the hands of tens of thousands of students.
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Experience
Research Assistant. Built the iSee explainable-AI cockpit and CloodCBR, the world's first microservices-based case-based reasoning framework.
2018–2023
Earlier roles: Founding Engineer at Vera · Senior Software Engineer at Proteus · Associate Software Engineer at 99X Technology · Visiting Lecturer at IIT.
02
Ventures
Technical Co-Founder. Scaled the LMS to over 50,000 students and 50TB of monthly traffic, and integrated five payment gateways processing Rs 200M.
2020–Present
Co-Founder. Low-cost Bluetooth attendance used by over 10,000 students. Named Most Innovative at the RGU Startup Accelerator, 2020.
2019–2023
Co-Founder and CTO. Led engineering across more than 20 projects serving over 30,000 users.
2014–2022
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Research & Publications
PhD in Artificial Intelligence (Federated Learning), Robert Gordon University, 2019–2024. My research spans privacy-preserving learning, explainable AI, and case-based reasoning.
Doctoral research
My thesis advanced federated learning on three fronts: more accurate distributed models through similarity-guided aggregation (FedSim), stronger privacy against gradient-inversion attacks, and greater transparency through the iSee explainability toolkit and CloodCBR.
Federated Learning
Similarity-guided aggregation and privacy-preserving training.
Explainable AI
iSee, a toolkit for sharing explanation experience between users.
Case-Based Reasoning
CloodCBR, the first microservices-based CBR framework.
Adversarial Robustness
Defending federated models against gradient-inversion attacks.
Selected publications
FedSim: Similarity-guided model aggregation for Federated Learning
C. Palihawadana, N. Wiratunga, A. Wijekoon, H. Kalutarage · 2022
JournalNeurocomputing 483
Mitigating Gradient Inversion Attacks with Frequency Transformation
C. Palihawadana, N. Wiratunga, H. Kalutarage, A. Wijekoon
Book ChapterSpringer
A Review of Modelling Experts in Question & Answer Platforms
C. Palihawadana et al.
JournalReview article
A Comparative Study of Link Analysis Algorithms
C. Palihawadana, G. Poravi · 2018
ConferenceISMS 2018
Recognition: Most Innovative at the RGU Startup Accelerator, 2020 · University of Westminster Prize for Outstanding Achievement and All-Round Performance · Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS).
04
Skills
AI & Machine Learning
Multi-agent Systems
RAG
MCP
LangGraph
Federated Learning
LLM Evaluation
Engineering
Python
TypeScript
React / React Native
AWS
Microservices
CI/CD
Writing
Notes on applied AI, multi-agent systems, and the craft of building products that ship. Coming soon.
Get in touch