Simon Hardy-francis
Staff Engineer - Performance And Cost Optimization
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSimon Hardy-francis is a Staff Engineer and founder with 15 years of experience building ultra-low-latency C/C++ and high-throughput systems, currently focused on performance and cost optimization at OpenTable in Vancouver. He designs instrumentation, deterministic benchmarking, and deployment strategies that have driven measurable CPU and cost reductions across large VMware and Kubernetes fleets. His background spans production-scale wins—tripling cluster capacity, saving millions in cloud costs, and boosting application throughput by hundreds of percent—earned at companies like Dapper Labs, Sysdig, and NuData/Mastercard. As an entrepreneur he’s delivered proof-of-concept C10M networking and shared-memory hash tables that outperform kernel stacks for extreme concurrency. He contributes practical test and performance improvements to notable open-source projects (e.g., YARA and Flow), blending deep systems internals with automation to catch regressions before production. Colleagues rely on him for surgical diagnostics, repeatable performance harnesses, and pragmatic re-architecting that preserves operational safety.
15 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Wadham
English, German
Github Skills (10)
c1710
go10
cbor10
c1110
performance-optimization10
yara10
test-automation10
testing10
hash-functions8
blockchain8
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
onflow/flow-go
Jun 2021 - Jul 2022
A fast, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain built to support the next generation of games, apps, and the digital assets that power them.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:145 reviews, 76 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Simon implemented and modified the `binstat` package, a utility for gathering and reporting code statistics within the project. Their contributions include adding instrumentation to measure performance, memory, and other internal metrics. They also refactored existing code, optimized functions like `x_2_y`, and integrated the `zerolog` library for improved logging and diagnostics, with a focus on performance. The user enhanced the network code with CBOR envelope code optimization.
golangnext-generationsecuregamesblockchain-platform
VirusTotal/yara
Sep 2020 - Oct 2020
The pattern matching swiss knife
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:20 reviews, 7 commits, 17 PRs in 16 days
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on improving the testing framework and fixing bugs within the YARA project. They addressed issues related to multi-block scanning, duplicate symbols, and compiler warnings. Their contributions involved modifying existing test files and adding instrumentation to the hash module to enhance testing coverage and reliability, and also updated the test framework to work with multi-block scanning.
yaramatchingknifepattern-matchingpattern
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