Will Simpson
Director, Technology at ORCID
Haywards Heath, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWill Simpson is a seasoned technology leader with over two decades of experience building and operating large-scale publishing and research infrastructure, currently serving as Director of Technology at ORCID. He leads an interdisciplinary team of engineers, DevOps and QA, manages a $300K hosting budget, and oversees a user support operation handling roughly 6,000 tickets monthly. As ORCID’s Privacy and Security Officer, he combines hands-on backend development with organizational compliance responsibilities including GDPR and external legal engagement. His career spans product-focused development at Wiley and Semantico—where he helped grow DawsonEra into the UK’s largest academic ebook supplier—to architecting and shipping core systems for the ORCID Registry. A physicist by training, he brings analytical rigor from numerical simulation work and a pragmatic operational mindset informed by prior roles as a consultant and independent contractor. Beyond engineering, his international teaching and volunteer experience reflect adaptability and strong cross-cultural communication skills.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
University College London
Stackoverflow
21reputation
2kreached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (6)
javas10
logging10
back-end-development10
java10
spring-boot9
liquibase6
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
ORCID/ORCID-Source
Feb 2013 - Jul 2022
ORCID Open Source Project
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 3339 commits, 1405 PRs in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Will contributed to the project by adding logging and a dry run option, indicating work in backend operations. They modified a Java file, SendBadOrgsEmail.java, introducing a dry run boolean and logging information to assist in debugging. The user also addressed issues related to organization disambiguation within the Java application, making small changes to the logic to refine the matching of organizations.
jenkinspostgres-databasepythonmavenjavascript
ORCID/orcidSearchUrlJs
Sep 2014 - May 2016
Contributions:16 commits, 3 PRs, 2 pushes in 1 year 8 months
apijavascript-librarybuildsjavascriptsearch-engine
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