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Dan Dissanayake
Personal Details
Date of Birth: 15th November 1975
Nationality: British
Marital Status: Single
Email: dan@patchrobe.com
Telephone: +33 (0)6177 22962
Summary
A polished server infrastructure manager with extensive experience of planning, prioritisation and technical/crisis resolution services.
With an academic background in formal logic, methodology, analysis and debating, I have gone on to gain considerable experience engineering and analysing systems and working with and leading people in high-stress, volatile environments in the London investment banking sector.
A liaison between users, project managers, systems and database administration teams and developers. As such, I have competencies in a very broad range of areas and can communicate on a peer level with all members of the software, hardware, deployment and maintenance cycles.
Presentable and personable with good written and verbal communication skills, the ability to rapidly acquire new skills and absorb information. A flexible, innovative thinker
Employment History
Period: 15/4/2006 to date
Travelling through France, pursuing interests in architecture, photography, studies in mathematics and physics, surfing and off-road driving. Primarily located on the beach at Ilbarritz/Biarritz and in a 17th century farmhouse 25 km outside Poitiers, I have driven the French coast from Calais to the Abbaie du Thoronet and spent time in the plains of central Spain.
Period: 2/2/2004 - 15/4/2006
Employer: Deutsche Bank - Corporate and Investment Banking
Title: Technical Systems Leader
Rank: Associate
Responsibilities:
Core role - member of the infrastructure team serving global corporate finance, credit trading/debt products and loan exposure management. Initially the sole european team member, eventually leader of a team of five reporting into a manager based in New York.
The infrastructure team was responsible for balancing the needs of the end users, software project teams, bank-wide enterprise service teams (i.e. unix and database engineers) and datacentre operations in order to deliver the best possible service to the bank.
The services in question were primarily java applications deployed on weblogic/JBoss using Oracle and MS SQL Server databases on SPARC and Intel enterprise hardware (Sun E4500 and Fujitsu 650), providing trading platforms, market data services, workflow applications and document management systems.
On-call support, acting as a technical escalation point for the team, for the recovery of services 24x7x365.
Project management, particularly scheduling and resourcing of server migrations, major upgrades and patching.
Secondary roles
Business continuity management and disaster recovery
Responsible for implementing and helping design the bank's ability to account for staff, communicate and provide the ability to continue business in the event of disaster or attack.
On the technical side this included the architecture of cost-effective resilient platforms (including choosing storage types and replication strategies and justifying costs to purchasing committees and technical reviews) and proving them before go-live of new services and in annual datacentre isolation tests.
On the human resources side, responsible for determining the core roles of the department, assigning desks, testing equipment at disaster recovery facilities and maintaining the crisis communication plan. Departmental crisis manager during the 7/7 bombings
Outsourcing
In conjunction with experience at Evolution, experience of both sides of outsourcing solutions. Responsible for designing and implementing the interface, workflows, SLAs and performance evaluation metrics of the outsourcing of the DB GCF infrastructure department with my line manager.
Assistant to the Technical Information Security Officer
Review of the operations of the department ensuring that confidential data was safeguarded and the regulations of the Financial Services Authority were met
Period: October 2002 - January 2004
Employer: Evolution Consulting Services
Title: Consultant
Responsibilities:
Part of a team that provides managed services based on the ITIL framework of best practices to a number of clients including tier one investment banks on a 24x7x365 basis.
Involved in working closely with development teams and support organisations within these clients to troubleshoot and resolve issues:
Service owner for an online market data portal for a tier one investment bank with responsibilities including acting as a technical escalation point for the service, producing and maintaining documentation and attending service review meetings
Carrying out standard maintenance tasks including releases of Java applications, updating of virus-scanning software, ensuring that tape back-up schedules have been completed, monitoring and responding to hardware, software and network failures and attending on-site when appropriate.
Responsible for configuration management, ensuring that all information regarding hardware, software and licenses for all services is up to date and that a definitive software library (including code source where appropriate) is complete
Debugging Java web applications and BEA Weblogic Server configuration for a re-insurance service portal
Supporting a Perl/Sybase/Solaris based document management system for the residuals market in response to local network changes and advising on diagnosis and fixes for maintenance issues
Building and hardening a Linux Red Hat 8 / Apache web server
Supporting a Word/VB equities research authoring tool
Assisting with code changes and releases for a forfaiting trading platform
Period: Jul 2000 – September 2002
Employer: Proquest Information and Learning
Title: Technical Support Engineer
Responsibilities:
Recruited as the junior member of the team and later becoming team leader. Responsible for the 2nd and 3rd line support, installation, maintenance and incident/problem resolution for a series of 20+ database products aimed at the university and national library market
Debugging C++ and Java web applications on a Solaris platform
Debugging C++
Windows applications
Providing technical backup and advice to the publishing, marketing and sales team internally and in meetings with business partners, at the Frankfurt International Book Fair and Online Olympia.
Analysed business need, made business case for, coded and deployed a Perl web application that gave the publishing, sales and marketing team direct access to current customer account information. This significantly improved the ability to target markets and plan sales strategy while eliminating the need for ad-hoc reports to be created by the billings and logistics team.
Delivered a Perl / MySQL application that allowed the customer service team to access and update product information and distribute trial passwords. This streamlined the process of trial access to products for customers and centralised information that was previously held in a variety of hard and soft formats at minimal cost.
Carried out the migration of customer technical data from a legacy format on a Solaris platform into Microsoft SQL Server using Unix shell scripts and the Perl DBI library.
Responsible for the administration of the customer subscriber information database and provided first line support to the customer services team.
Wrote an application to import customer data from an Access database into proprietary formats and a relational database which permitted timely delivery of a multi-million dollar contract.
Configured Apache for new products
Created a load testing script to stress test new hardware
Hold presentations for new joiners explaining the roles of the technical support and testing departments.
Period: May 1999 – June 2000
Temporary Contracts
Various temporary contracts including:
June/July 2000
Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research: Administration and web-site maintenance in preparation for the Tokyo 2000 conference
June 2000
Volvo Construction Equipment Europe Ltd: Administration
December 1999 / April 2000
Guinness Export Trading: Export Administrator
May 1999 / July 1999
Hitachi Home Electronics (Europe) Ltd: Assistant to the Head of Business Administration
Period: Aug 1998 – Feb 1999
Employer: UK Government - Department for Education and Employment
Title: Interventions and I.T. Liaison Officer
Extensive pressured customer service and employment vetting in a wide client base including violent and special needs cases
Frontline duties in benefits and immigration enforcement in Heathrow Airport’s catchment area
Courses and extensive experience in managing difficult and special needs clients, negotiation, interviews and crisis management/resolution.
Responsible for the maintenance of office software and hardware and the DfEE’s secure databases including installing patches, establishing new accounts, carrying out the daily,
weekly and monthly back-ups, providing first-line support and ordering new hardware.
Training and qualifications
Aug 2005 Experience implementing and one week of formal training in the Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge
Feb 2005 EMC Certified Documentum Administrator
Nov 2003 Sun Certified Systems Administrator for Solaris 9
Apr 2003 BEA Certified Weblogic Server 7.0 Administrator, BEA Systems Ltd
Dec 2002 ISEB IT Service Management Foundation Certificate (ITIL standard) ISEB
Academic History
| Qualification | University/School | From | To |
| BA Honours Degree in Philosophy (2:1) | University College London | 1995 | 1998 |
| Tripos Part 1A (year 1 of 4) Masters in Engineering (special) | Clare College, Cambridge University | 1994 | 1995 |
| A Levels Mathematics(A), Further Mathematics(C), Physics(A1)
Chemistry(B) | The John Lyon School for Boys | 1992 | 1994 |
| 10 GCSEs at A-grade including French | The John Lyon School for Boys | 1990 | 1992 |
Hobbies and interests
Guitar - played guitar for 14 years, owner of a 1958 re-issue Fender Telecaster and an Art and Lutherie Folk Cedar. Particular interest in playing Hendrix and blues rock
Music - founder member and part of the C64 Breakbeat team, which under the stewardship of my friends at Higher Status Events was voted 10th best breaks club globally at the Breakspoll Awards 2006 hosted at Fabric, London. Basic DJing skills. Technician at the Plump DJs "Eargasm" album launch party, the Fingerlickin' Records charity gig and instigator of the Tsunami Breaks charity event which earned over £2000 for disaster relief in Asia
Driving - owner of a 1985 military spec. Land Rover Defender 110 which has recently been through the mountains and forests of the Pyrenees, Haut Languedoc and Gascony
Board riding - competent snow boarder and wholly incompetent though keen surfer
Reading, particularly philosophy of science and asian writings on mind and strategy