Simon Harris - Resume

Shelly Beach, Ballina, New South Wales, Australia.

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

Overview

A product and people focused leader with over 30 years experience developing commercial and product-aligned technology strategy; managing and growing empowered product-mode teams; and architecting, building, and running systems.

I have hands-on experience from low-level programming to board membership, and the myriad things in between, and I’m not afraid to get my hands on some code when the moment calls.

I have a proven track record working as part of a team, scaling organisations to deliver effectively in competitive markets. I have studied Psychological Safety, and Clinical Psychology, as well as undertaken leadership coaching in order to improve my effectiveness as a leader.

Based on my experience and diverse skill set, I believe I am well-suited for senior leadership positions in technology or engineering departments, including:

Chief Technology Officer: Given my track record in technology strategy development, team management, and project delivery, I can provide strategic direction, oversee technology operations, and drive innovation within an organisation.
Head of Engineering: With my experience in managing large engineering teams, leading technical initiatives, and driving organisational change, I believe I would thrive being responsible for setting the engineering vision, driving technical excellence, and fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration.
Director of Product Development: Given my experience in product-aligned technology strategy and cross-functional collaboration, I am well suited to a role where I would oversee the end-to-end product development process. I would work closely with product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders to drive the successful delivery of products aligned with business goals.
VP of Technology: My experience in technology leadership, strategic planning, and team management makes me well-suited for a VP-level role in a technology-focused organisation. I could provide leadership in shaping the technology roadmap, driving technical excellence, and fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
Technology Consultant or Advisor: Given my broad range of technical expertise and experience across various industries, I would could also provide valuable insights and guidance to organisations seeking to optimise their technology strategy, improve team performance, or drive digital transformation initiatives.

About

I started my professional career as an apprentice assembler programmer in 1991, managed my first team in 1996, and have been involved with nearly every aspect of product development and delivery ever since.

I’m always looking for opportunities to grow, and have been fortunate to have worked in a variety of roles that challenged me in different ways:

As an agile coach and programming instructor I learnt how important it is to understand where people and systems are today in order to understand how to get them to where they need to be.
Doing technical pre-sales and on-site consulting taught me how to rapidly come up to speed in a business domain, articulate what good looks like, and manage stakeholder diversity.
Running product development and architecture from iPhone apps, bio-technology, real-time high-frequency trading, and US$100M ARR online marketplaces gave me an appreciation for the value of rapid feedback and the clear articulation of trade-offs in the decision-making process.
Hiring, managing, and leading teams showed me that the most effective way to scale is to trust, empathise with, and empower people by creating opportunities and supporting them to grow so they can apply the most effective skills, tools, context, and decision-making heuristics.

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

Current Experience

2024-current: Head of Engineering, Clinical Solutions iCare World

2021-current: 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

Performed software, systems, architecture, and operations, as well as directly informing legal 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 and Appearances

2024: AU Evo Inspires #74

Appeared on the EVO AU podcast again, this time for a 5-min lightening Q&A.

2023: Evo AU #98 – Scaling A Development Team

Appeared on the EVO AU podcast along with 3 other guests to discuss challenges, approaches, mistakes, and lessons we’ve learnt scaling teams.

2005: Beginning Algorithms, Wrox Press

Co-authored with James Ross, Beginning Algorithms guides readers through the basics of algorithms and data structures, and examines specific algorithms that will help readers in programming tasks. In particular the examples in the book were almost entirely test-driven—an approach has drawn its fair share of criticism for being overly pedagogical.

Education and Training

2023: Participatory Leadership, Art of Hosting

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: Certified Practitioner, The Fearless Organization

The Fearless Organization Scan uses the body of work of Amy C. Edmondson to help organizations measure and improve psychological safety in their teams.

2022: Certificate, Motivational Interviewing - Foundational

Dr. William Miller, Dr. Stephen Rollnick & Dr. Theresa Moyers
Grade: 97/100
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 and Membership

Tech Council of Australia (“TCA”), Data Working Group.

Prior Experience

2022-2024: Engineering Director, Envato

Responsibilities

Reporting to the CTO
Responsible for ~130 staff Asian 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 implemented a major restructure of the business and ways of working towards product-led initiatives.
Initiated and led the development of a lightweight governance 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 to improve speed and quality.
Envisioned, created, and staffed an Engineering Effectiveness (“EE”) team to improve 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.
Initiated and led a review of and approach to evolve infrastructure and operations.
Initiated and led the re-platforming of our digital asset management platform to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness, and address the opportunity cost of the in-house solution. This included a business case, board approval, vendor due diligence, legal review, commercial vendor negotiations, and project governance.
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: 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: Senior Engineering Manager, Content Group, Envato

Responsibilities

Reporting to the CTO.
Respomnsible 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

Responsibilities

Reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager.
Manage a team of 6 direct reports.
Set direction and drive execution by organising team work, setting goals, and holding the team accountable.
Collaborate with stakeholders including customers and other product managers in the development and execution of the team’s roadmap.
Communicate strategy, rationale, and progress within the team and to external stakeholders.

Achievements

Performed the role whilst continuing to operate in my capacity as the group Lead Engineer role.
Worked with other the product managers and stakeholders from across the business to put together a roadmap.
Delivered a number of those initiatives to improve the customer experience by:
Automatically identified and removed duplicate and similar content from the shopfronts.
Enabled satellite and subsidiary businesses to access the centralised content library via an API.
Enabled satellite and subsidiary business to send their content to the centralised library via an API.
Reduced downtime by measuring and addressing system performance under load.
Reduced downtime and dependency between shopfronts by centralising content distribution.
Improved internal operations by centralising and simplifying the process of managing content publication and removal.
Reduced operating costs by reviewing and removing old, stale, and rejected content.
Improved search and discovery by providing shopfronts with curated content quality signals.
Established career development plans for 2x senior- and 3x mid-level engineers.

2018: Lead Engineer, Content Group, Envato

Responsibilities

Reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager.
Take ownership of and proactively improve the architecture of systems.
Work with teams and stakeholders to identify and solve tangible business problems and improve delivery capability.
Work with and drive teams to define what success looks like, set goals, define metrics, organise work, and track progress.
Monitor, assesses, and escalate issues to do with team, systems, and delivery.
Monitor and assist in adjusting team pace to instil a sense of urgency while remaining calm and ensuring the team acts sustainably at all times.
Understand and communicate strategy, rationale, solutions architecture, and progress to the team and to stakeholders.
Guide, co-write & review design documentation.

Achievements

Worked as part of an initiative to drive operational efficiency through the use of machine learning.
Worked with the Principal Software Architect to articulate a vision for the evolution of our systems in order to meet commercial objectives.
Worked with the Principal Software Architect to introduce a lightweight approach to improve the way product changes are communicated, reviewed, and delivered including Requests for Comments (“RFC”), Architecture Decision Records (“ADR”), and Non-Functional Requirements (“NFR”).
Performed technical due diligence for the acquisition of Placeit.

2017: Engineering Hiring Specialist, Envato

Responsibilities

Reporting to the CTO.
Working as part of the people team.
Improve Envato’s Engineering capability and capacity.
Increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”).

Achievements

Hired the first participants in our apprentice program. The apprentice program is open to women entering the technology workforce for the first time.
Doubled the hiring rate while maintaining standards by applying Lean practices.
Doubled the number of female engineers by identifying and addressing biases within the process, proactively reaching out to candidates, and continuously measuring against targets.
Recruited and hired Envato’s first female Senior Engineering Manager.

2017: Engineering Lead, LAMP, World Mosquito Program

Responsibilities

Work with scientists from Monash University with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to rollout and monitor measures to control the spread of malaria throughout South-East Asia, the Pacific, South America, and Northern Australia.

Achievements

Built custom machine learning (“ML”) computer-vision (“CV”) software to analyse smartphone photographs of trays containing mosquito DNA experiments.
Enabled local laboratories to run automated analysis of experiments at a fraction of the cost and with error rates an order of magnitude lower than the previous manual process.

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.
Currently 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 current leading industry competitors.
Deployed Aizen at the University of Houston, Texas to analyse rock samples.

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 by two orders of magnitude the number of trading clients.
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 has 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.

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.

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, and 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 eXreme 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.

Keywords

Agile, Algorithms and Data Structures, Analysis, Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), Architecture, Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), Art of Hosting and Harvesting, Assembly Language, Business Rules, C/C++, Career Development, Cascading Stylesheets (“CSS”), Change Management, Coaching, Communication, Computer Vision (“CV”), Continuous Improvement, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (“CI/CD”), Culture Change, Data, Databases, Decision-Making, Delivery, Design, Development, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (“DEI”), Due Diligence, Effectiveness, Empowerment, Engineering, eXtreme Programming (“XP”), Event Sourcing, Execution, HyperText Markup Language (“HTML”), Governance, High Performance Computing (“HPC”), Hiring, iOS, Java, Javascript, Kotlin, Leadership, Machine Learning (“ML”), Motivational Interviewing (“MI”), MySQL, Objective-C, Object-Oriented Programming (“OOP”), Operations, Participatory Leadership, People Management, Performance Management, PostgreSQL, Product Development, Psychological Safety, Recruitment, Risk Management, PowerBuilder, Roadmapping, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software, SQL, Strategy, Swift, Theory of Constraints (“TOC”), Typescript, Vision.