Simon Tuffs

Simon Tuffs has over 20 years of work experience in various technical roles. Simon is currently working as a Staff Software Engineer (Observability) at Woven Planet since August 2022. Prior to that, they took a sabbatical from December 2021 to August 2022 to pursue academic, business, and personal growth. During this time, they created "The Anomalizer," a prototype engine for analyzing real-time metrics in observability systems and built a consulting company around it.

Before their sabbatical, Simon worked at Palo Alto Networks from August 2015 to November 2021 as a Principal Engineer, leading the development of real-time analytics for cloud-based security systems. Simon also worked at Life360 from July 2014 to August 2015 as a Senior Engineer, focusing on location services and developing new services for processing large amounts of streaming data.

Simon also has previous experience at Netflix, where they worked from September 2010 to April 2014 as a Senior Software Engineer. Simon was involved in real-time analytics projects with a focus on ensuring the quality of software pushes to production and preventing failures caused by bad code and dependencies. Simon also worked on the streaming server team, delivering three major systems in twelve months.

In addition, Simon has worked at Appscio as a Senior Engineer from December 2008 to September 2010, at simontuffs.com as an Independent Consultant specializing in web services scalability studies from March 2003 to September 2010, at Altera Corp. as a Senior MTS from May 2006 to December 2008, at Siderian Software as a Software Engineer from November 2004 to May 2006, and at Lutris/Gridion Inc as a Senior Staff Engineer from April 2000 to April 2003.

Throughout their career, Simon has demonstrated expertise in real-time analytics, cloud-based systems, location services, and web services scalability studies. Simon has also been involved in leading development, architecture, and team leadership roles.

Simon Tuffs completed their B.Eng in Electronic Engineering at the University of Liverpool from 1978 to 1981. Following this, they pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in the field of Self-Tuning Control Systems from 1981 to 1984.