Simon Rolfmore

I report to the VP of engineering for Altium 365, looking at platform-wide issues including authorization, audit and compliance, improving the tenancy model, and other architecture-focused problems.

Returning to the new owners of Navico, I had a wider remit to focus on hands-on organisation-wide system architecture and cross-team collaboration, including designing and supervising the build of PKI, device management, identity, and attestation for a new hardware platform, defining and growing our service offering and build/run strategies to Brunswick, and helping teams with the more complex compliance, security, and observability concerns that come with a larger organisation and an enterprise-focused IT department. I was the software and OS group’s security architecture lead, taking point on global legal compliance, safe over-the-air update processes, prototyping and building new data sync protocols for implementation on 6 platforms with over 250 engineers, and leading Brunswick’s technical response to UK PSTI legislation. I also built several small but important new production services and libraries when time and headcount were critical. Ultimately, the entire architecture function was eliminated from Brunswick, along with a number of other development teams across Europe.

Working in the core access control team for Azure DevOps, I quickly picked up a complex, 15-year-old codebase handling trillions of requests per month. Within 3 months, I had identified the cause of a core performance issue which had caused several outages, and proposed and implemented a fix to a complex group membership evaluation system which had not been addressed for over 5 years. I mentored 4 junior staff members, participated in hiring calls, advocated for substantial architectural improvements, and worked with other principal-level engineers on the “extended leadership team” for the product.

I established, hired, and lead Navico’s Connected Services team, the first in the company to foster a culture of test-driven development, continuous improvement, full service ownership, and openness. In 3 years, we built a highly distributed, event-driven IoT data platform capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands of devices, a single account platform for all of our apps, sites, and brands with over 1.5m users (250k MAU), and an encrypted content delivery ecosystem serving over 700m requests per month. We maintained a minimum 99.9% SLA, delivered to customers in 200 countries worldwide. As a small team, we created dozens of services with a serverless-first, cloud-native architecture, and the company’s first continuous delivery cycle, which combines build, deployment, reliability, and full-system observability through detailed performance metrics and alerting prior to OpenTelemetry standardisation. Reporting to the CTO of a $1 billion business, my role was to enable the team to collectively do our best work, acting as a sounding board, quality bar, mentor, and hands-on engineer. I collaboratively guide team decision-making from system architecture and clarifying requirements to code and process review, facilitating productive conversations with our internal and external stakeholders. I also had overall responsibility for security and privacy across a development organisation of over 150 people.

Same role as before, specialising in application development and platform services.

Working with a handful of companies, I assisted in the architecture of systems utilising the full spectrum of Azure infrastructure and platform services. I educated people from the C-suite to on-the-ground engineering teams, building custom workshops and proof of concept demos, presentations, and hands-on lab sessions to provide clear guidance on current practices and new technologies. I was recognised as the team’s subject matter expert on high-scale web deployments, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, Azure AD app authentication, and Azure Search, delivering team-wide “drop-in clinics" for application development help and advice to over 100 other solution architects.

Lead development at a cloud-native startup spun off from Cube52.

I lead the development of P3: Cube52’s “single pane of glass” platform for managing cloud estates across public, private, and on-premises (P3) environments, starting with Microsoft Azure and Azure Pack. P3 was a Bootstrap-driven responsive ASP.NET MVC and Web API application, using Azure Active Directory for authentication, and Redis for caching and coherence Long-running tasks were serviced by a flexible, generic job engine developed in-house and running on worker roles using Azure Service Bus and DocumentDB for communicating and storing progress and status. The application manages Azure properties through Azure Resource Manager, Graph API, and the CSP Commerce REST API. Mentored the team in good practices such as DRY and SOLID principles, use of dependency injection, security, and testing.

I lead a new team to replace a Java-based eCommerce application used by over 1.5m people and developed by a third-party, bringing expertise in-house while substantially reducing operating and deployment costs from over $300k to $5k per month and leading to a step change in shop profitability. I conducted code reviews and worked with the team to improve code quality adhering to SOLID principles, with unit and integration testing in NUnit and Moq. I implemented the majority of the application’s Azure integration, reliability, insight, and scalability systems through Managed Cache, SQL Server 2012, Azure SQL DB, Web and Worker Roles and Kibana. I built integrations with our in-house digital asset management system to drive the store catalogue, eliminating an error-prone and time-consuming manual process. I built new features and re-architected existing systems for higher flexibility and efficiency for over 14m users of pottermore.com, leveraging a custom CMS with complex taxonomy and ontology support to provide a highly customised experience for passionate fans of the Harry Potter series.

Introduced OO, web development, and MVC concepts to a development team experienced in Oracle PL/SQL and Borland PowerBuilder while creating a new ordering website for the company’s multi-store voucher system. The new site uses ASP.NET MVC3 and modern web standards with HTML5 semantic markup and graceful degradation for older browsers and those without JavaScript available, has a simpler and more flexible order process, and supports online payments. Lead development of and architected the company’s flagship online product (a childcare voucher management system used by over 200,000 staff) including a complete rebrand with simplified user interface. Modern HTML5 and CSS3 markup is rendered throughout using ASP.NET MVC 3, enhanced with LESS and jQuery where appropriate, while remaining entirely functional for legacy browsers even if JavaScript is unavailable. Created a lightweight content management system to allow automatic per-client substitution of key text, images, and downloadable assets, controlled by the marketing department. Created secure SOAP 1.2 Web Services using Windows Communication Foundation for a Home Office system involving the Post Office’s Horizon platform for in branch point of sale payment authorisation. Designed and created ASP.NET MVC4/Web API systems to provide all business logic and authentication for an new product with a front end developed by a third party. Consulted with designers on rebrand of main company website and selected the Umbraco content management system to allow integration with web applications while providing the flexibility and ease of use required by the marketing department.

My primary role was to expand and improve Aon Hewitt’s flagship software, known as Greater Insight – an international multi-tenant platform for benefits and pension management used by tens of thousands of people worldwide. Greater Insight was developed initially using VB.NET, ASP.NET, and LINQ to SQL, transitioning to C# and Entity Framework for ongoing work. I designed, architected, and developed modules and key systems on the platform and provided consultancy, information, and code reviews to other teams across the world. Recognised as the company’s Microsoft SQL Server expert, I gave best-practice recommendations to ensure the performance, 24/7 availability, and security of a new employee flexible benefits system deployed to cater for a 1-week benefit enrolment period used by over 8,000 employees of a large multinational in worldwide locations.