Simon Hildrew
Software Engineer at junohq
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
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RockstarSimon Hildrew is a software engineer based in Edinburgh with 14 years’ experience specialising in backend, DevOps and continuous delivery for large-scale web systems. He has a proven track record modernising deployment pipelines and infrastructure—work that includes improving The Guardian’s image management and frontend deploy processes and building automated RPM-based CI/CD for the Alerta monitoring system. Comfortable across shell scripting, AWS, Elasticsearch and build tooling (TeamCity, Riff-Raff), he focuses on reliable, production-ready automation and operational resilience. Formerly at The Guardian and now developing at juno.legal, he blends newsroom-scale reliability with pragmatic engineering, often preferring succinct tooling and scripting improvements that quietly reduce operational toil.
14 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
2,631reputation
136kreached
13answers
7questions
aws-lambda
top-1%
java
top-5%
amazon-web-services
top-5%
json
top-5%
Github Skills (35)
deploying10
teamcity10
amazon-elasticsearch10
aws-lambda10
sbt10
bash10
cicd10
automation10
elasticsearchquery10
aws10
aws-elasticsearch10
elasticsearch10
automations10
devops10
elasticsearch-api10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
guardian/grid
Sep 2017 - May 2021
The Guardian’s image management system
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:204 reviews, 270 commits, 152 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on configuring and maintaining the Elasticsearch environment used by the image management system. They added and modified shell scripts to manage Elasticsearch, implemented GC logging and file rotation, and migrated deploy builds to a new Riff-Raff configuration. The user also made changes to the dependencies, including AWS libraries, and enabled cluster transport sniffing. These changes suggest a focus on infrastructure and back-end operations.
management-systemproductionguardianimage-management
guardian/frontend
Apr 2012 - Oct 2020
The Guardian DotCom.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:50 commits, 22 PRs, 25 pushes in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily worked on improving the deployment process and infrastructure configuration for the frontend application. They updated the build configuration to utilize a unified deploy strategy using Riff-Raff, incorporating changes to the SBT config and adjusting artifact settings. Additionally, they modified the deployment radiator to handle both unified and componentized deploys, ensuring the application's smooth operation. The user's contributions also involve managing dependencies and removing a superfluous feature to reduce the size of the application.
productionguardian
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