Simon Helson
Lead Engineer - Observability (Staff Engineer) at Xero
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Helson is a Lead Engineer with two decades of deep experience designing and operating large-scale, highly resilient cloud and data-centre networks for high-volume broadcast and web platforms. He combines hands-on expertise with Cisco and Juniper hardware, BGP-heavy Layer 2/3 architectures, and network automation using Ansible and Python to drive repeatable, reliable infrastructure. Simon has led cross-functional teams and project-managed complex migrations (including zero-packet-loss core upgrades) while translating technical detail into clear management-ready documentation. His background spans mission-critical roles at the BBC, WorldPay, Yelp and Xero, where he’s focused on automation—“automating all the things”—and end-to-end troubleshooting across application, server and network stacks. He brings a pragmatic systems mindset from building automated host and monitoring systems (Cobbler/Puppet/Zenoss) to evolving modern cloud networks. Based in Wellington, New Zealand, he’s as comfortable in the command line as presenting architecture to executives, and often surfaces subtle operational risks before they become outages.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Commerce Computer Science, Bachelor of Commerce Computer Science at University of Canterbury
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (42)
pyez9
junos-automation9
netconf9
load-balancer8
irc8
django8
python8
midi-controller8
vsphere8
hipchat8
discord7
netbox7
arduino-library7
network7
network-automation7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
shelson/SmugMirror
Oct 2015 - Feb 2022
Mirrors a SmugMug library to a local location
Contributions:6 PRs, 4 pushes, 3 branches in 6 years 4 months
ipsmirrorslocationdfinitysmugmug
neverthenetwork/inventa
Sep 2022 - May 2026
Discovery/Visualisation of Network Topologies via BGP-LS and other means
Contributions:1 review, 7 PRs, 11 pushes in 3 years 9 months
bgpvisualization
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