avatarharuki zaemon

Simon Harris - Resume

Shelly Beach, Ballina, New South Wales, Australia.
Shelly Beach, Ballina, New South Wales, Australia.

[email protected] +61 417 505 611 harukizaemon.com

Overview

Technology leader and company director with full P&L accountability, spanning 35+ years from assembler programming to board governance. I build and scale empowered, product-mode engineering teams that deliver in competitive markets. I’m not afraid to get hands-on when the situation demands it.

My career spans individual contribution, management, and executive roles: from low-level software development, to leading 200+ engineers through organisational transformation, to shepherding Software as Medical Device through FDA 510(k) and EU MDR certification.

I’ve prepared organisations for outside investment, and currently serve as a non-executive board member. This range gives me credibility with engineers, commercial accountability with investors, and governance experience with boards.

I’m deliberate about how I lead. I’ve studied psychological safety and clinical psychology, completed executive education in digital transformation and financial performance, and trained in participatory leadership methodologies. I use this to create environments where teams perform under pressure—whether that’s scaling a marketplace platform for investment readiness or delivering regulated AI/ML systems to market.

What I’m looking for: CTO, VP Engineering, or Director-level roles with board or P&L accountability, where I can set technology strategy, scale teams, and drive measurable business outcomes.

Relevant Skills

Strategic: P&L management, board governance, M&A due diligence, vendor negotiations, investment readiness, technology strategy, regulatory strategy.

Operating Model: Product operating model (POM) transformation, agile/lean organisational design, participatory leadership, psychological safety.

Architecture & Platforms: Cloud/SaaS, microservices, real-time/high-frequency systems, digital asset management, marketplace platforms, HPC/image processing.

Data & AI/ML: Data strategy, data governance, machine learning operations, computer vision, AI governance for regulated environments.

Security & Compliance: HIPAA, GDPR, ISO27k, FDA 510(k), EU MDR, QMS, incident management, business continuity planning.

Engineering Practices: CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, RFC/ADR processes, engineering effectiveness, apprenticeship programs.

About

I started as an apprentice assembler programmer in 1991 and have worked across nearly every aspect of product development since. Four lenses shape how I lead:

  • Agile coaching: Meet people and systems where they are before guiding them forward.
  • Technical consulting: Rapidly learn a domain, articulate what “good” looks like, and align diverse stakeholders.
  • Product delivery: From iPhone apps to high-frequency trading to regulated medical devices, rapid feedback and clear trade-offs are universal.
  • Team building: The most effective way to scale is to trust, empathise with, and empower people with skills, context, and decision-making authority.

I speak Japanese and hold a 6th degree black belt in Aikido, having trained as a live-in student in Japan since age 15.

Current Experience

2026-present: Director, iCare World Australia

Concurrent with Head of Engineering, Cloud Solutions (2024-present)

Responsibilities
  • General corporate governance under the Corporations Act.
  • Oversight of finances, operations, regulatory and compliance, human resource management, commercial, sales, and marketing activities.
  • Risk management and Business Continuity Planning (BCP).
  • Periodic reporting to the board of directors.

2024-present: Head of Engineering, Cloud Solutions, iCare World

Responsibilities
  • Reporting to the VP of R&D.
  • Responsible for a distributed team of 25 product-focused software, DevOps, infrastructure and security engineers and architects across Australia, Italy, Netherlands, and Finland.
  • Domains: ophthalmic technology (AI retinal analysis, data management, clinical review, and patient referral).
  • Work closely with R&D peers, and other global heads of product, design, regulatory, quality, sales, marketing, finance.
  • People and team management including workforce planning, team restructuring, hiring, career development and growth, and performance management.
  • Systems operations, budgeting and cost management, architecture, risk, and security.
  • Roadmaps, planning, and delivery of product-focus projects, and keeping the lights on (“KTLO”) activities (e.g. BAU, systems upkeep, etc.)
  • Travelled to Europe multiple times a year to ensure continuity and alignment between regional teams.
  • Technical direction and strategy for cloud solutions.
  • Technical lead for AI Software as Medical Device.
Achievements
  • Introduced AI policies, processes, practices, and ways of working for Software as Medical Device (SaMD) and Health Software.
  • Introduced a technical ownership model, global on-call and support, and incident management process and procedures.
  • Led a project to define the company’s Cloud Software as Medical Device regulatory approach and necessary changes to the Quality Management System (QMS), in collaboration with the quality and regulatory (QARA) team.
  • Achieved US Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) pre-market approval (510k) and EU MDR certification for the company’s first Software as Medical Device (“SaMD”). The product (ALTIUS) launched in August 2024.
  • Achieved HIPAA and GDPR compliance for the company’s Software as a Service (“SaaS”) products.
  • Worked with heads of product to develop a long-term product vision and strategy.
  • Worked as part of the R&D leadership team to review and refresh our overall technology team strategy.
  • Introduced a lightweight decision-making framework that reduced time-to-decision for technology investments and improved senior leadership alignment.
  • Initiated and led a review of and approach to evolve infrastructure, operations, and security including bringing those functions in-house.
  • Maintained COGS growth below customer usage growth across all SaaS products, preserving margin while scaling platform demand.
  • Worked as part of the senior leadership team to design and implement a major restructure of the business and ways of working towards a true product operating model (POM).
  • Successfully integrated three acquired teams into the product operating model, retaining key talent and aligning delivery roadmaps.
  • Currently working towards ISO27001 compliance.

2021-present: Non-Executive Board Member, Team Kids

Responsibilities
  • Participate in quarterly board meetings, and regular strategy and planning sessions.
  • Advise the Founder, CEO, and CFO on technology, commercial, and operations strategy.
  • Directly review, assess, and guide IT operations.
Achievements
  • Led technology, data, architecture, and regulatory compliance due diligence for the successful acquisition of Kids Unlimited.
  • Worked with the head of IT to develop a long-term technology strategy directly aligned with the long-term business strategy. This enabled the business to more effectively invest resources where they would generate the most value.

Publications & Appearances

2005: Beginning Algorithms, Wrox Press (Wiley). Co-authored; test-driven approach to algorithms and data structures.

2023: Evo AU #98 – Scaling A Development Team (podcast).

2024: AU Evo Inspires #74 (podcast).

Education & Training

2025: Aalto University Executive Education Digital Transformation, Financial Performance, Customer-Centric Innovation, Commercial Excellence, Self-Leadership, Growing as a Leader, Fundamentals of Accounting.

2023: Participatory Leadership Tools, techniques, and practices for scaling teams and organisations, enabling faster decision-making, and genuinely partnering to create systems change in our fast-paced, top-down world.

2022: The Fearless Organization Certified Practitioner. The Fearless Organization Scan uses the body of work of Amy C. Edmondson to help organisations measure and improve psychological safety in their teams.

2022: Motivational Interviewing - Foundational Certificate, Dr. William Miller, Dr. Stephen Rollnick & Dr. Theresa Moyers. Motivational Interviewing (“MI”) is a way of conducting conversations about change to strengthen clients’ motivation and commitment. MI has been found to be useful in helping people change across a broad array of problems in counselling and psychotherapy, health care, coaching, social work, and education.

Affiliations & Membership

2026-present: Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD).

2022-2024: Tech Council of Australia (“TCA”), Data Working Group.

Other Ventures

2016-2024: Co-founder and Engineering Lead, Startup - Automated Analytics

Responsibilities
  • Hands-on engineering, developing and delivering high-performance image processing, visualisation, and digital asset management platform targeting bio-medical, materials science, and geo-physics industries.
  • Working with a scale-up looking for market fit with the high-performance-computing (“HPC”) sector for biomedical and health research.
Achievements
  • Developed a range of proprietary CPU and GPU-based statistical and machine learning (“ML”) software tools to process computed tomography (“CT”), scanning electron microscope (“SEM”), and light microscope images.
  • Developed a custom web-based visualisation and catalogue management tool.
  • Scaled the denoising, segmentation, and analysis to support images in the hundreds of gigabytes size range.
  • Scaled the processing of images to be orders of magnitude faster than the then leading industry competitors.
  • Deployed Aizen at the University of Houston, Texas to analyse rock samples.

2003: Simian Code Clone/Duplication Detection Tool

  • Built Simian, a tool for detecting copy-paste code in a multitude of programming languages.
  • Sold Simian to Quandary Peak Research in late 2022.
  • Simian is used by hundreds of commercial and open source projects world-wide including defence departments, space research organisations, and large consulting firms.
  • The mathematics institute of the Netherlands replaced their home grown-system with Simian.

Prior Experience

2022-2024: Engineering Director, Envato

Scope expanded

Responsibilities
  • Reporting to the CTO; Responsible for ~200 staff Asia Pacific Engineering team.
  • 9 direct reports: 3x Senior Engineering Managers, 2x Engineering Managers, 1x Senior Principal Engineer, 1x Senior Principal Engineer, 2x Lead Engineers.
  • Domains: supply (content and authors); demand (customer); satellites (traffic generation); data, data-science, and BI-analytics; infrastructure, and practice.
  • Work closely with the heads of analytics, design, marketing, and product to prioritise, plan, and deliver product and platform improvements.
  • Member of the cross-functional senior leadership, cross-functional product development leadership, and technology leadership teams.
  • People and team management including workforce planning, team restructuring, hiring, career development and growth, and performance management.
  • Systems operations, budgeting and cost management, architecture, risk, and security.
  • Roadmaps, planning, and delivery of product-focus projects, and keeping the lights on (“KTLO”) activities (e.g. BAU, systems upkeep, etc.)
  • Technical direction and strategy.
Achievements
  • Worked as part of the senior leadership team to design and implement a major restructure of the business and ways of working towards product-led initiatives.
  • Initiated and led the development of a lightweight governance framework to drive the adoption of Machine Learning (“ML”) and Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) for both operations and product improvement.
  • Initiated and led the development of our Analytics and Data vision and strategy.
  • Worked with heads of product to develop a long-term product vision and strategy.
  • Worked as part of the technology leadership team to review and refresh our overall technology team strategy.
  • Initiated and drove a pilot near-shoring team, led by one of the Senior Engineering Managers as part of a strategy to expand our global workforce.
  • Introduced a lightweight approach to decision-making across senior leadership and engineering that improved speed and quality.
  • Envisioned, created, and staffed an Engineering Effectiveness (“EE”) team that improved the way Engineering operates as a function to the benefit of the business as a whole.
  • Initiated and led an “Engineering Uplift” initiative to create a culture of continuous improvement by bringing together the leaders of previously disparate engineering teams, growing their skills as leaders, and creating an engineering-wide program of work to uplift performance.
  • Led infrastructure and security insourcing strategy, reducing vendor dependency and improving operational control.
  • Worked with the people team to explore options for near-shoring as part of a strategy towards a global presence, and scaling the workforce while managing the cost of operations.
  • Worked as part of the senior leadership team to prepare the organisation for outside investment, including technology and data due diligence process.

2021-2022: Engineering Director, Envato

Responsibilities
  • Reporting to the CTO; Responsible for ~60 staff Asia Pacific Engineering team.
  • 7 direct reports: 1x Senior Engineering Manager, 3x Engineering Managers, 1x Senior Architect, 1x Senior Principal Engineer, 1x Apprentice Mentor.
  • Domains: supply (content and authors); data, data science, and BI-analytics, infrastructure; architecture; practice; and apprentice program.
  • Member of the cross-functional senior leadership, cross-functional product development leadership, and technology leadership teams.
  • People and team management including workforce planning, team restructuring, hiring, career development and growth, and performance management.
  • Systems operations, budgeting and cost management, architecture, risk, and security.
  • Planning and delivery of strategic projects and keeping the lights on activities (e.g. BAU, systems upkeep, etc.)
  • Technical direction and strategy.
Achievements
  • Initiated and led the development and execution of a coherent data strategy to address the business needs of self-service performance and insights, data literacy, data as a product, and data governance.
  • Led the expansion of our apprentice program from 1 to 2 teams, including business case, board approval, and hiring an additional mentor. The apprentice program is open to women entering the technology workforce for the first time.
  • Led the development and rollout of the remainder of our career development framework, working with the people team to rebuild our position and job descriptions, build out our learning and development materials, and formalise a holistic approach to workforce planning.
  • Initiated and led the development of a 3-5 year technical and product strategy for one of our recent commercial acquisitions.
  • Developed and promoted a Senior Engineering Manager to whom I delegated most of my supply-side responsibilities. This gave her greater opportunity to grow and thrive, and me more time to focus on a broader set of responsibilities.

2020-2021: Senior Engineering Manager, Content Group, Envato

Responsibilities
  • Reporting to the CTO.
  • Responsible for ~30 staff across 5 Asia Pacific Engineering teams.
  • 6 direct reports: 1x Senior Engineering Manager, 3x Engineering Managers, 1x Senior Architect.
  • Domains: supply (content and authors), architecture, and infrastructure, operations innovation.
  • Member of the content leadership and technology leadership teams.
  • People and team management including workforce planning, team restructuring, hiring, career development and growth, and performance management.
  • Systems operations, budgeting and cost management, architecture, risk, and security.
  • Planning and delivery of strategic projects and keeping the lights on activities (e.g. BAU, systems upkeep, etc.)
  • Technical direction and strategy.
Achievements
  • Introduced a lightweight approach to consistently and coherently articulating actionable technology strategy.
  • Initiated and led the development of a content group strategy and roadmap for evolving and maintaining the platform architecture to meet the needs of the business.
  • Initiated and led a restructure of content group product delivery teams aligned to business capabilities.
  • Initiated and led the development of a company-wide technology team strategy to meet the needs of the business.
  • Established an infrastructure team within the content group to ensure sustainability of operations.
  • Led the development of the technology team career map which we made public in 2021.
  • Led the development of a technology team performance and progression framework, including clear expectations, remuneration and assessment framework.

2019: Delivery Team Lead & Product Owner, Content Warehouse, Envato

Built the centralised content warehouse and APIs that eliminated duplicate content, decoupled shopfronts, and reduced system downtime.

2018: Lead Engineer, Content Group, Envato

Introduced RFC/ADR architectural decision practices and led technical due diligence for the Placeit acquisition.

2017: Engineering Hiring Specialist, Envato

Redesigned hiring practices to double the number of female engineers and launched Envato’s first apprentice program for women entering tech.

2017: Engineering Lead, LAMP, World Mosquito Program

Built custom ML/CV software to automate mosquito DNA experiment analysis, reducing cost and error rates by an order of magnitude.

2014: Engineering and Delivery Lead, Interbank eFX High-Frequency Trading, ANZ

Responsibilities

Manage the development and delivery, and perform hands-on development of ANZ’s global electronic foreign exchange (eFX) high-frequency marketplace, providing liquidity to over 30 international banks, hedge funds, and foreign exchange brokers such as Reuters.

Achievements
  • Improved tick-to-trade latency from seconds to single-digit milliseconds.
  • Increased trading client count by two orders of magnitude.
  • Doubled the number of instruments offered.
  • Tripled the number of securities offered.
  • All but eliminated non-business trade rejections.
  • Split a monolithic codebase into more focused components creating greater autonomy for sub-teams.
  • Simplified the build and release process and moved from quarterly to weekly releases.
  • Introduced continuous integration practices.
  • Replaced three legacy integration platforms.
  • Significantly improved overall supportability and reliability.
  • Built out co-location in London and Tokyo.

2011: Consultant and Developer, Cogent Consulting

Led the development and delivery of an online learning environment and accompanying iPad app for Melbourne Business School; Worked with another developer and a designer to build Readtime, an iPhone app for getting through your read-it-later list. Readtime was featured in New & Noteworthy in 50+ countries as well as reviewed on sites such as Beautiful Pixels, Lifehacker, One Thing Well, and Cult of Mac.

2009: Practices Lead, Civica

Led the introduction of automated testing, continuous integration, and mapping out the architecture for the next generation of their flagship product used by Local Government Authorities around Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia.

2008: Consultant and Developer, Cogent Consulting

Managed the development and delivery, and performed hands-on development of Runway, a web-based Getting Things Done (“GTD”) application. Runway had features that at the time were unique, including natural language parsing for todo items including dates, times, contacts, reminders, tags, contexts, etc.; Managed the development and delivery, and performed hands-on development of a business rules system used to classify book content for repurposing as website content at Lonely Planet.

2003: Independent Consultant

Worked with numerous multinational and domestic organisations around Australia providing agile coaching, performing architecture reviews, leading development teams, and performing hands-on development.

2001: Java Practice Lead, ThoughtWorks Australia

Employee number 11 at Thoughtworks Australia; Responsible for hiring local developers, technical pre-sales, agile coaching, developing and delivering training material; Managed teams and performed hands-on development at NAB, Westpac, Suncorp, and Macquarie Bank in the development and delivery of large distributed applications.

1999: Independent Consultant

Led teams; Provided agile coaching; Developed and ran Object-Oriented training courses; Worked as a hands-on developer for clients such as United Energy, VicRoads, and DMR (now Fujitsu).

1996: Developer, Addease

Managed a team of 6 people and performed hands-on development; Developed a large-scale, client-server Human Resources application that was eventually bought out by Morgan Banks recruitment; Introduced eXtreme Programming (“XP”) practices.

1991: Apprentice Developer, Australian Systems Engineering

Developed mainframe applications for Australian and international clients; Taught myself x86 and IBM System/370 Assembler, C, and C++; Built CPU emulators, interpreters, and compilers for proprietary languages that are still in use today; Assisted with the instruction of several System/370 programming courses conducted by ASE at Ferntree Computer Corporation.