Damian Perera

Software Engineer, Distributed Systems · Germany

Who

I build the systems everything else depends on.

I'm a software engineer based in Germany. I design and lead changes from the first RFC through to production, usually across a few teams at once.

I've spent a decade on the distributed systems that have to stay up while a business grows around them.

I care more about choosing the right approach than defending a favourite one, and I'm happiest seeing the impact of my work in real life.

How I work

I design for the day things go wrong.

Most outages come from a corner of a system nobody fully understood. So I put in the effort up front to reverse engineer the problem, then design the solution with clear boundaries, sensible failure modes, and enough visibility to trust it in production.

I bring the rest of the team with me through RFCs and honest discussion, because the design everyone understands is the one that survives contact with reality.

Skills

I fit the work to the problem.

10 years in, I've built backends, mobile apps & front ends, infrastructure, and the awkward glue between them - in whatever language and shape the problem actually called for. The range is deliberate: I would rather understand a system end-to-end and choose the right approach than reach for the same familiar tool every time.

I work by owning a change from the first RFC through design, build, rollout, and the on-call that comes after, keeping a few teams pointed the same way, and staying close enough to the code to know it holds together. Deep where it needs to be - broad everywhere else.

Career

Where I've spent it.

The short version. The longer one is a good conversation.

Zone24x7 · 2016 - 2017
Started out in R&D, prototyping across mixed reality and IoT and shipping systems for enterprise clients.
CloudCone · 2017 - 2018
Built and ran cloud and infrastructure products end-to-end, close to the metal, for a hosting platform.
Sysco LABS · 2018 - 2021
Grew into a Lead Engineer on the systems behind a $20B+ business. I owned architecture and delivery for high-throughput services and helped raise the operational bar for the whole team.
Personio · 2021 - Present
Senior Engineer on the core platform. I design and lead changes end-to-end, set patterns other teams now build on, and work across engineering and product to ship things that stay up.