Simon Drake

Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer with over a decade of experience building resilient, highly available backend systems at scale. Technical lead for a Kubernetes platform underpinning $2 billion in ARR, with a proven track record of setting technical vision, picking up new technologies with ease, and delivering complex, business-critical services.

Work Experience

  • Principal Software Engineer at Splunk

    — present
    • Technical lead for a Kubernetes operator, responsible for underpinning $2 billion in ARR, which orchestrates provisioning and lifecycle management of the platform
    • Set the multi-year technical vision for a distributed team spanning multiple timezones
    • Architected a declarative, CRD-driven workflow framework — covering retries with exponential back-off and cancellation/deadlock handling — replacing fragile bespoke logic with resilient, observable controllers
    • Drove a major platform integration end-to-end, from RFC through to production, enabling the next generation of containerised workloads
    • Designed automation, including an AI agent skill, that translates Custom Resources to upstream interfaces with built-in validation, removing manual code changes from new-feature rollout
    • Incident commander on customer-facing escalations (root-CA distrust, legacy-cipher deprecation, SSO/auth outages), coordinating cross-team resolution under pressure
    • Pioneered AI tooling adoption: built an OAuth-secured Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and an internal AI platform from scratch, giving engineers safe, authenticated AI access to internal systems

  • Senior Software Engineer at Splunk

    —
    • Subject Matter Expert for a Kubernetes-operator-pattern service that orchestrates provisioning and lifecycle management of the platform underpinning $2 billion in ARR
    • Led automation initiatives that saved $2 million a year in cloud costs and eliminated hundreds of hours of manual TOIL
    • Designed certificate lifecycle automation — automated rotations and custom CN/SAN validation — hardening the security posture of the entire fleet
    • Go Subject Matter Expert, driving best practice and code quality across the business

  • Senior Full Stack Developer at The Workshop

    —
    • Led the migration of core microservices from Node.js to Go, for increased performance and stability
    • Led the development of a highly scalable and resilient platform that handled millions of requests a day
    • Implemented a new API design using gRPC and grpc-gateway
    • Key individual in the development of the React frontend

  • Senior Developer at MMT Digital

    —
    • Working with a leading comparison site, I led the transition them from a monolithic C# architecture to a Node JS microservice architecture
    • Implemented standard testing approaches (TDD) and frameworks (Mocha, Chai, NYC), Docker boilerplates, Git best practices and created stand utilities for use across multiple microservices to avoid duplication and assist with future maintenance
    • Rapidly learning new technologies that I hadn’t used before (e.g. Docker)

  • Full Stack Software Developer at Blue Chip

    —
    • Responsible for the development and testing of five micro-services and a frontend
    • Automated the migration of the database technology from RethinkDB to MongoDB
    • Converted the frontend from Angular 1 to React
    • Subject Matter Expert for the businesses reporting requirements, using Crystal Reports and Sisense