Sanjiva is the CEO and Founder of WSO2, an enterprise technology provider for integrating application programming interfaces, applications, and web services locally & across the internet. He is also the Founder and Chairman of the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF). LSF was founded to promote the development of Open Source Software in Sri Lanka. Before starting WSO2 in 2005, he was a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York.

He was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003. Sanjiva was the original creator of Apache SOAP, and is an elected member of the Apache Software Foundation. Sanjiva was elected to the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in 2005, where he served for two years. He is a member of the Faculty of Engineering Industry Consultative Board at the University of Moratuwa, where he was a visiting lecturer in the 2000s. Sanjiva also serves on the Board of Directors at Sampath Bank PLC.

Sanjiva has a B.S. and M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Kent State University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.