// hi, my name is

Chrishan Fernando

Senior Systems Engineer · Safety-critical systems · Requirements, integration & V&V

Twelve years engineering safety-critical systems across regulated MedTech and defence. Most recently at Harrison.ai, leading systems engineering for the Harrison Open Platform, a multi-tenant platform serving hospitals worldwide; before that, six years on defence systems at Thales and Boeing. My focus is the engineering that holds complex systems together — requirements, interfaces, integration, verification and safety. I care about building technology that makes a real difference to the people who depend on it.

📍 Sydney, Australia

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01.

About

I'm a systems engineer — I own the parts that hold a complex system together: requirements, interfaces, integration, verification and safety. At Harrison.ai I owned system-wide requirements, led patient and security risk assessments, and served as audit SME for MDSAP — defending design and development practices to keep the platform compliant with ISO 13485, ISO 14971 and IEC 62304.

Before MedTech I spent six years in defence at Thales and Boeing: flight simulators, air traffic management, command-and-control systems, and tactical data links. I've written C for collision-avoidance systems, Python for navigational data analysis, and lately a lot of specs for AI to write the code for me.

Outside of work I tinker — mostly with AI-assisted development (Claude Code, OpenSpec), healthcare interoperability (SMART on FHIR), and self-hosted tools that scratch my own itches.

B.E. Mechatronics / B.Com (Finance), First Class Honours
University of Sydney · 2009 – 2013
Merit Scholarship · Major Industrial Project Placement Scholarship

Systems Lifecycle

Requirements EngineeringV&V StrategySystem ArchitectureInterface ControlImpact & Regression AnalysisTrade StudiesConfiguration Management

Regulatory & Safety

ISO 13485ISO 14971IEC 62304MDSAPDCB 0129SaMD Clinical RiskNCR Investigation

Technical

DICOM / PACS / RISSMART on FHIRPythonTypeScriptMongoDBDocker / K8sAWSGrafana

AI-assisted Development

Claude CodeOpenSpecSpec-to-code workflowsRapid POCs
02.

Experience

Senior Systems Engineer / Acting Technical Product Owner @ Harrison.ai

2021 – 2026
Clinical AISaMDISO 13485 / 14971 / 62304
  • Led systems engineering and software release cycles for the Harrison Open Platform (HOP) — a multi-tenant clinical AI platform delivering AI results for chest X-ray and CT brain/chest studies into hospital radiology workflows.
  • Owned system-wide functional and non-functional requirements; translated product vision into feature elaborations, acceptance criteria and interface specs for features like Comparison of Priors, Triage, Translations and a 3rd-Party AI Adapter.
  • Led patient and security risk assessments for SaMD/AI model components (ISO 14971, DCB 0129); served as SME for MDSAP audits, defending Design & Development and Production Controls chapters to maintain ISO 13485 / IEC 62304 compliance.
  • Release lead across multiple engineering teams: coordinated delivery, managed dependencies, escalated risk, and drove fix/defer calls on production non-conformances.
  • Defined production metrics and analytics (Grafana, MongoDB, Tableau) to monitor adoption, diagnose issues and close the loop with data-driven configuration tuning.
  • Drove AI-assisted development adoption: OpenSpec + Claude Code spec-to-code workflows, POCs to de-risk product bets, and mentoring junior systems engineers.

Systems / Software Engineer @ Thales Australia

2015 – 2020
DefenceFlight SimulationAir Traffic Management
  • Work Package Manager — scope, schedule, budget, risk and safety — for an obsolescence remediation project on the RAAF Wedgetail flight simulator.
  • Programmed updates to the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) in C, and Python tooling to analyse large volumes of navigational data.
  • Contributed to the Australian Defence Air Traffic Management System (ADATS): schematic updates and on-site validation testing at a live control tower.
  • Recognised as requirements management 'Champion', trained at Thales France HQ; led engineering tooling adoption across teams. Nominated for Emerging Talent; received a Business Development award.

Graduate Systems Engineer @ Boeing Defence Australia

2014 – 2015
C2 SystemsTactical Data Links
  • Requirements management and verification on the Vigilare air defence command-and-control system, supporting integration of new capability into a deployed RAAF C2 platform.
  • Resolved trouble reports across Tactical Data Links (Link 11, Link 16, AADSLINK).

Graduate Systems Engineer @ ResMed

2014
Medical Devices
  • Requirements management, verification, and defect root-cause analysis on the Astral life-support ventilator.

Engineering Intern @ Qantas Airways

2012 – 2013
Aviation
  • Built a C# cabin layout optimiser compliant with FAA regulations (university thesis project).
03.

Things I've Built

FolioXtracker

Multi-user investment portfolio tracker for Australian DIY investors, live at folioxtracker.com. Records trades across crypto and equity platforms, normalises everything to AUD, fetches daily prices from Yahoo Finance, and gives buy-only rebalance recommendations against category targets. Email/Google sign-in with multiple portfolios per account, broker file and IMAP auto-imports — open-source and self-hostable on Vercel or a Raspberry Pi.

Next.js 16React 19TypeScriptDrizzle / Tursoshadcn/ui

SMART on FHIR Demo

A ~110-line SMART on FHIR app that launches inside a sandbox EHR, reads the patient and their observations, and writes a clinical note back — handling the addendum-vs-edit distinction EHRs treat differently in the wild. Most public SMART demos only read; this one writes back, which is where the interesting integration questions live.

FHIROAuth 2.0Healthcare ITVanilla JS

Garage Door Left-Open Alert

An ESP32 that detects when the garage door has been left open and pushes an alert to my phone. Deliberately scoped to monitoring only — an earlier design drove the opener's control input via relay, but removing the actuator made the system cheaper, simpler, and incapable of causing harm. Runs standalone on the microcontroller with no hub or always-on server.

ESP32ESPHomeIoTEmbeddedHome Automation
04.

Get In Touch

Whether it's systems engineering in a safety-critical or regulated environment, or something you're tinkering with — my inbox is open.

hello@chrishanfernando.com