IFS has elevated Thilanka Jayathilaka to Vice President – HR for Sri Lanka, India, and Global Operations, expanding her responsibilities across two of the company’s most significant delivery markets while adding a global mandate to her remit. The appointment reflects her more than a decade of progressive HR leadership across the technology and consumer goods sectors, and signals the company’s intent to deepen its people function as it accelerates through a period of exceptional growth.
Jayathilaka has been with IFS since 2021, progressing from Director – Human Resources to Vice President – Human Resources before assuming her enlarged role. In that time, she has been instrumental in shaping the people architecture of IFS Sri Lanka, which serves as a critical hub of talent and engineering capability for the broader organisation. Under her leadership, the Sri Lanka operation established university partnership programmes and a scholarship initiative that draws students into the business as early as their second year of study, with half of the last 800 hires in Sri Lanka originating from campus pipelines or internships.
Prior to IFS, Jayathilaka held senior HR roles within the Fonterra group, serving as Associate Director – Human Resources at Fonterra Brands Sri Lanka and Head of Human Resources at Fonterra Future Dairy India, where she led HR strategy across markets and supported cross-border business expansion. Earlier in her career, she worked with Unilever across multiple HR functions including business partnering in tea and supply chain, and learning and capability development. Her earliest leadership experience came through AIESEC in Sri Lanka, where she served as Vice President – Talent Management with responsibility for the organisation’s learning environment and talent systems.
She holds a Master of Business Administration from Cardiff Metropolitan University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.
In her expanded role, Jayathilaka will lead HR strategy across Sri Lanka and India while overseeing global operations priorities, driving talent acquisition, organisational effectiveness, and people-centric transformation initiatives aligned with IFS’s global growth agenda. The scope of her responsibility encompasses a workforce that spans the full IFS technology and services portfolio, from ERP and enterprise asset management through to field service and AI-driven platforms.
IFS, founded in 1983 and headquartered in London, has grown into one of the world’s foremost providers of Industrial AI and enterprise software, serving asset-intensive and service-centric industries across manufacturing, maintenance, energy, defence, and field service operations. The company employs more than 7,000 people across 80 countries IFS and operates through its flagship IFS Cloud platform, which integrates capabilities across ERP, EAM, SCM, and field service management. Annual recurring revenue surpassed €1 billion in 2024 IFS, and the company delivered 23% year-on-year ARR growth in FY2025 IFS as Industrial AI adoption moved from pilot programmes into full-scale operational deployment across its customer base.
Sri Lanka occupies a central position in IFS’s global delivery model, with the Colombo operation housing a significant portion of the company’s engineering, consulting, and support talent. As IFS scales its Industrial AI capabilities and continues to win enterprise mandates from some of the world’s largest industrial organisations, the HR function in Sri Lanka and India will play an increasingly strategic role in sustaining that growth through talent pipeline development, leadership succession, and cultural cohesion across geographies.
Jayathilaka is widely recognised within IFS and the broader technology sector as an advocate for female leadership and employee wellbeing. She has championed mentoring programmes within IFS Sri Lanka, where approximately 29% of the workforce is female, and has led the company’s Let’s Talk mental health initiative — a programme that provides structured support across career stages from new joiners through to long-serving employees.
