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

Product-focused leader, with good understanding of how business requirements impact technical decision making.

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

Experience

IBM

2014 - present

Current role: Program Director

• Responsibilities across Cloudant, Compose & IBM Cloud Databases offerings. These are mission critical services for both IBM Cloud & its customers.
• Cover Infrastructure, Security, Compliance & Reliability teams (UK, US, China, Germany).
• Help set direction of the product, negotiating with stakeholders across the offering, BU & broader business.
• Lead compliance automation efforts for IBM Cloud, including liaising with external auditors, NIST & IBM Research, based on tooling we built for Cloudant. This has been open sourced at https://auditree.github.io/.
• Help define the structure & organisation of the business unit to meet business & technical goals.
• Manage and mentor staff from across the immediate and broader organisation, at various levels of seniority (interns through to peers).
• Maintain University of Bristol relationship, fostering collaboration between IBM and the University.

Previous responsibilities:

• Helped the Cloudant acquisition integrate with IBM - technically, organisationally & culturally.
• Grew Cloudant engineering team from ~25 to ~70, hiring at many levels (interns through to leaders) across the skill sets required (developer, operations, support, management, developer advocacy, product management).
• Offering manager for the launch of IBM Graph service.
• Led R&D efforts around using Kubernetes for novel deployments of Cloudant.
• Stood up “Service as a product” team, trying to drive service thinking & best practice in the portfolio.
• Full cycle incident management & response.
• Customer events & meetings,representing IBM Cloudant at trade shows.
• Liaise with European Sales leadership on strategy, hiring & go-to-market.

Cloudant

2012 - 2014

Range of roles in small, rapidly growing start up:

• Product management.
• Service API development (billing, account management etc.).
• Sales engineering.
• Release engineering & QA.
• Ops on call.
• Support on call.
• Front end development for CouchDB. Resulted in being made a committer on Apache CouchDB
• Developer advocacy, including speaking at various conferences (All Your Base, QCon etc.) & representing Cloudant at trade shows.
• Develop documentation, code samples, blogs.

Second UK employee:

• Hired UK team, wrote business case for CEO to set up Bristol office.
• Grew from 2 to 14 at point of acquisition.
• Involved in most hires made by the engineering/product team.

Bristol University

2006 - 2012

Research Assistant & Research Associate

Convened the Data & Workflow Management group.

• Team of ~50 spread around the world (UK, US, Italy, Switzerland).
• Responsible for mission critical processing, transfer & bookkeeping of CMS experiment data (10PB/year).
  • Designed large parts of the workflow management system.
  • Created a data services team to simplify access to various stores of information.
  • Stakeholder management between different groups.
  • Ran data management project PhEDEx, team of ~5 people.
  • Helped define dataset book keeping system - simplified requirements by defining a naming convention.

2002 - 2006

PhD student

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

• Worked in data management team, built prototype of data management system (PhEDEx) to manage multiple petabytes of data.
  • Developed metadata catalog integration tool (Java web service).
• Wrote Python (matplotlib) and SQLite based analysis tooling to speed up Monte-Carlo simulation. -Tested storage software for “Tier 1” UK Lab (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory).
• 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.