Simon Newton
Head Of Platforms
Perth, Western Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Newton is a seasoned infrastructure and platform leader with 18 years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale cloud systems across Google, Uber, and now Canva, where he leads a broad Platforms org. He combines hands-on engineering—authoring Uber’s Crane infrastructure work and contributing to open-source projects like Open Lighting Architecture and Go ZooKeeper—with strategic leadership in reliability, cost reduction, and developer experience. Simon has deep expertise in networking, SDN/NFV, CDN and platform tooling, and an unusual hobbyist specialty in lighting-control protocols (DMX512, E1.31/E1.33, RDM) where he has chaired ANSI standards groups. Known for finding obscure bugs and hardening systems, he pairs pragmatic problem-solving with a taste for making things “harder^Weasier”: better, faster, stronger. Based in San Francisco and originally from Australia, he also advises AI and YC-backed startups, bringing platform-scale judgment to early-stage product decisions.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Software, Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Software at The University of Western AustraliaHigh School, High School at St Stephen's School
English
Stackoverflow
21reputation
819reached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (31)
c-language10
qt10
multithreading10
testing10
zookeeper10
network-programming10
go10
sys10
cplus10
embedded10
error-handling10
cpp10
dmx51210
cprogramming-language10
libusb10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
OpenLightingProject/ola
Dec 2007 - Feb 2017
The Open Lighting Architecture - The Travel Adaptor for the Lighting Industry
Role in this project:
Back-end & Embedded Systems Engineer
Back-end & Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:5 releases, 3931 commits, 420 PRs in 9 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Simon contributed to the Open Lighting Architecture (OLA) project, focusing on the development and implementation of the E1.33 protocol for controlling lighting devices. Their work involved enhancing the basic E1.33 controller by adding support for reverse-connection models and features like setting and retrieving RDM timing parameters. The user demonstrated expertise by adding detailed functionality, including enabling and disabling control, as well as optimizing performance by using separate queues for each port.
sacnprotobufc-plus-plusenttecstreaming-acn
mcallegari/qlcplus
Dec 2013 - Oct 2014
Q Light Controller Plus (QLC+) is a free and cross-platform software to control DMX or analog lighting systems like moving heads, dimmers, scanners etc. This project is a fork of the great QLC project written by Heikki Junnila that aims to continue the QLC development and to introduce new features.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 6 comments in 9 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on fixing warnings and adapting the codebase to newer compiler versions, such as clang v5.0. They addressed issues in various UI components and core functionalities, including sliders, audio triggers, XY pads, cue lists, and buttons, indicating a deep understanding of the application's architecture. The user also made enhancements to the OLA plugin, switching it to use OlaCallbackClient, thus ensuring compatibility with different versions. This demonstrates a clear effort to maintain and improve the project's stability and expandability.
controllerqlcmidic-plus-plusenttec
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.