Simon Guest is a veteran Contract Software and DevOps Engineer in New Zealand with 15 years of experience building and modernising large-scale, production Linux systems and platforms. He combines a rigorous mathematical education from Cambridge with deep practical skills across Python, Go, C/C++, Rust and Clojure, and has repeatedly delivered migration and deployment automation for HPC, cloud and container environments (OpenStack, Terraform, Podman, Fedora CoreOS, Rocky Linux). As a founder and technical lead he has designed web-scale systems and led embedded and platform transitions, while at AgResearch he architected and executed a petabyte-scale ZFS migration moving ~200M files with custom Python tooling. He’s an active open-source maintainer with impactful contributions to the rkt container runtime’s stage1_fly component, showing a knack for improving low-level process and environment handling. Comfortable across infrastructure, backend and security concerns, Simon blends pragmatic engineering with formal rigor and a track record of turning complex, legacy estates into modern, automated platforms.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Diploma, Computer Science, Diploma, Computer Science at University of Cambridge
[Project ended] rkt is a pod-native container engine for Linux. It is composable, secure, and built on standards.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:8 commits, 4 PRs, 62 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on modifying and improving the `stage1_fly` component of the `rkt` project, particularly related to process credentials and environment handling. They implemented features to preserve the environment between the `run` and `enter` phases, ensuring proper application execution. Additionally, the user refactored and optimized the existing code, addressing bugs and improving overall code quality, while making minor changes related to RPM/deb package upgrades.
Contributions:1 release, 13 PRs, 64 pushes in 8 months
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