Simon Metson

• simonmetson@googlemail.com
• 07811395365

Intro

I delight in solving problems by working with innovative people & technology. I find solutions that are both creative and maintainable. During my career I’ve learnt how to work through people, recognising that an effective team is more productive than any single contributor. I relish finding team structures that are efficient & make the most of my team members skills.

I resolve problems with a balance of collecting data and intuition & judgement, and recognise a solution may be technical, non-technical, or a mix of both. I enjoy working with large systems, and like identifying ways to simplify them; through either technical, procedural or organisational changes.

Skills

Innovative leader experienced in running distributed teams of highly-skilled engineers and project managers.

Product-focused leader, with multiple examples of ownership across all aspects of product from inception through to delivery and maintenance lifecycle

Engaged with whole product life cycle: requirements, design, implementation, change management, maintenance, delivery & operation.

Worked in academic, VC, PE & publicly traded environments, and have a good understanding of nuances and differences of each.

Experience

EDB

2020 - 2026

Current Role: SVP Engineering

• Managed rapidly growing line of business in the $10-100M TCV range
• Defined product strategy and technical architecture with peers & team for “leading” Multimodel Data Platform as assessed by Forrester
• Consistent on time, on budget delivery of key product feature/function in both SaaS and on premise software
• Helped scale out AI adoption within engineering team, including project managers & delivered useful AI products to market
• Mentored techincal and non-technical staff at all levels of experience
• Grew, reskilled and contracted team, hiring ~60 people during the pandemic
• Built & launched DBaaS product in 9 months, rapidly taken through succesful SOC2 & PCI audits over the course of the following year
• Worked with small & large partners; involved in contract negotiations, defining scope of work as well as joint delivery
• Joined as Senior Director, promoted to VP and then SVP

IBM

2014 - 2020

Program Director

• Responsibilities across Cloudant, Compose & IBM Cloud Databases offerings. These are mission critical services for both IBM Cloud & its customers.
• Helped define the structure & organisation of the business unit to meet business & technical goals.
• Help set direction of the product, negotiating with stakeholders across the offering, BU & broader business.
• Led compliance automation efforts for IBM Cloud, including liaising with external auditors, NIST & IBM Research. This has been open sourced at https://auditree.github.io/.
• Managed and mentored staff from across the immediate and broader organisation, at various levels of seniority (interns through to peers).
• Helped the Cloudant acquisition integrate with IBM - technically, organisationally & culturally.
• Offering manager for the launch of IBM Graph service.
• Led R&D efforts around using Kubernetes for novel deployments of Cloudant.
• Liaise with European Sales leadership on strategy, hiring & go-to-market.

Cloudant

2012 - 2014

Acquired by IBM

Range of roles in small, rapidly growing start up:

• Product management.
• Engineering contributions across the stack & SDLC
• Front end development for CouchDB, resulted in being made a committer on Apache CouchDB
• Ops on call & Support on call
• Supported sales engineering
• Developer advocacy, including blogs & speaking at various conferences (All Your Base, QCon etc.) & representing Cloudant at trade shows

Bristol University

2006 - 2012

Research Assistant & Research Associate

Convened the Data & Workflow Management group.

• Team of ~50 spread around the world (UK, US, Italy, Spain, Switzerland).
• Responsible for mission critical processing, transfer & bookkeeping of CMS experiment data (10PB/year).

Ran invite only “Bristol Big Data Days” with people from HP Labs, GCHQ etc.

2002 - 2006

PhD student

Thesis: “Invisible Decays of the Higgs Boson at the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector”, funded through e-Science PPARC grant.

• Worked in Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) data management team, built prototype of data management system (PhEDEx) to manage multiple petabytes of data at 100+ laboratories worldwide
• Tested storage software for “Tier 1” UK Lab (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) & ran network performance testing of UK academic network
• Procured & built hardware for department data centre

Reading University

1998 - 2002

MPhysUn - Master of Physics & the Universe

• Final projects:
  • Fortran simulation of the earth’s geodynamo
  • Solving quantum wave equations with genetic algorithms
• Worked as freelance web developer (ASP & front end)

Colne Community High School/College

• A level Maths, Music, Music Practical, Physics
• GCSE’s: 11 A*-C including Maths, Science, English lit/lang

Personal

I live in Bristol with my wife, two children, dog & ever growing instrument collection.