Rohana Kumara VP – Engineering at Sysco LABS – an avid technologist with unique perspectives

Rohana Kumara, who serves as the Vice President – Engineering and Architecture at Sysco LABS, the innovation arm of Sysco, the global foodservice leader, is an avid technologist with over 20+ years of experience in engineering highly scalable microservices and cloud-based applications in the restaurant industry, capital markets, financial services, banking, and healthcare.

He champions the use of data, emphasising its importance in business analysis to advance humanity. 

‘In God we trust, all others must bring data’, a quote by Dr. W. Edwards Deming is a favourite of Rohana’s, and an idea he firmly stands behind, as it emphasises the importance of data measurement and analysis when doing business. 

Since graduating with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, his interest in data science began after listening to one of the great speeches of Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Rohana noted: “I found his speeches on machine/deep learning and how advancements in this area could help in processing and analysing colossal quantities of data to assist in the early detection of critical illnesses that could never have been done by humans alone deeply fascinating and had a huge impact on me.”

At Sysco LABS, he oversees and guides the engineering teams in building and transforming mission-critical enterprise applications across the supply chain domain.

Having grown with the company that today employs over 700 individuals, Rohana joined Sysco LABS during its early days – then a six-member team. Previously, he had worked at several other early-stage start-ups which provided valuable lessons and experience. 

He said: “The biggest motivator a start-up could offer you is the flexibility you get in choosing the technology, tools and experimenting with them. The success of the start-up largely depends on the trust of each individual and the ownership they take in the delivery of the products rather than working under a well-defined process which comes with a lot of overheads that can be detrimental to the productivity of a start-up and its culture. 

“Individuals in a start-up need to play a part in all roles such as product/feature designing, engineering, quality assurance, and operations.”

With his work with start-ups leaving an indelible mark in his career, he added: “One needs to be highly flexible and patient to navigate and venture into the constantly changing directions of a start-up, as they can struggle for some time to find their true end goal.” 

His reasoning for staying on at Sysco LABS was because “Sysco was technologically advanced compared to many competitors, and at the same time, offered its engineers with ample opportunities to contribute to the digitisation journey and business transformation.”

“Sealing the deal, the main motivator was that Sysco LABS, as a part of Sysco, the world`s largest food services company, had opportunities to digitise the way food was distributed/served, with technology playing a massive role in this digitisation journey.”

With his involvement in managing tech teams for many years, Rohana abides by the decades-old ‘servant leadership’ concept. According to him, this is the one leadership approach especially powerful when leading teams in engineering and information technology and pays off to help move the company forward.

Providing inspiration for his work is Phil Bogle, a role model he continues to look up to. 

Rohana noted: “I had the privilege of working with and learning from Phil Bogle, a great engineering leader who guided me in the early stages of my engineering career when working for Jobster. I like the fact that while he was the CTO of the company, he was also a brilliant programmer who could program alike in multiple programming languages such as java, ruby, etc., and guide the team by example.”

He is passionate about applying modern microservices-based architectural styles and clean coding practices to build highly scalable and efficient cloud native applications. When Rohana is not orchestrating the transformation of a trillion-dollar industry, he enjoys spending his downtime travelling places, enjoying music, and biking.