Simon Aronsson
Engineering leader focused on boring code, excellent engineering teams, and reliable systems.
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Norrköping, Sweden
linkedin.com/in/simonaronsson
Summary
Engineering leader with experience building and scaling high-performing, globally distributed teams in cloud and observability domains. Accountable for multi-team product areas, managing managers and driving strategy, delivery excellence, and cross-functional alignment across product, SRE, and field engineering. Proven track record improving roadmap execution, standardizing platforms for enterprise delivery, and building high-retention engineering organizations with strong engagement. Combines deep technical expertise with pragmatic business alignment.
Experience
Head of Observability
Oct 2021 — Present
Canonical Ltd · Remote, Global
- Own Canonical’s observability product portfolio end to end, spanning roadmap, delivery, adoption, and lifecycle. Used across commercial cloud engagements, open-source users, and internal operations. Lead a 13-person product engineering organization across 3 teams, with engineering managers as direct reports, delivering enterprise-scale observability for cloud-native environments.
- Defined and delivered Canonical Observability Stack from start to generally available: a supported open-source observability product for public and private cloud-native environments, built for both enterprise-scale centralized deployments and lightweight near-edge scenarios.
- Standardized OpenTelemetry and Kubernetes operating patterns across telemetry signals, service mesh, reliability testing, and chaos engineering.
- Grew Canonical Observability Stack from zero to ~90% adoption across product engineering teams building charms, making integration with the stack, tailored alerting, and visualization part of the product delivery standard for improved operational readiness.
- Drive cross-functional alignment with field teams, customer-facing teams, internal operations, enterprise customers, and internal VP/C-level stakeholders on observability architecture, adoption strategy, and operational readiness.
- Introduced an organization-wide observability maturity framework to raise the quality bar for telemetry coverage, reliability practices, operational readiness, and adoption planning.
- Defined Canonical charm integration governance adopted by product teams building charms, requiring documented interfaces, declared schemas, peer review, and publication in official documentation.
- Scaled the organization from 4 to 13 engineers, maintaining engagement scores consistently well above the company average, while also leading end-to-end hiring pipelines for ~10 other teams over time.
Head of Developer Relations
Jan 2020 — Sep 2021
Grafana k6 · Remote, Global
- Led Developer Relations for k6, the open-source load testing and performance engineering company later acquired by Grafana Labs, reporting to the VP of Marketing and managing a 2-person team across developer advocacy, community, documentation, workshops, integrations, extension ecosystem, and product feedback.
- Created the Developer Relations strategy framework and six-month roadmap process, giving the function a repeatable operating model for community, documentation, advocacy, ecosystem, and product feedback work.
- Helped grow k6 from ~5k to ~14k GitHub stars by improving documentation, workshops, integrations, community support, and the k6 Cloud for open-source projects program.
- Defined and drove the k6 extension framework from zero to 29 official and community extensions, expanding the project’s ecosystem and integration surface.
- Designed, built, and shipped the k6 Operator for Kubernetes and xk6-chaos, extending k6 into Kubernetes-native distributed testing and chaos experimentation.
- Drove a full documentation migration and rewrite with the VP of Marketing, rebuilding developer onboarding, reference material, examples, and adoption paths for both the open-source project and commercial product.
- Supported the open-source-to-cloud motion with customer success through customer seminars, documentation, workshops, integrations, and community support, helping open-source users become internal advocates for k6 Cloud adoption.
Founder / Principal Consultant
Jan 2019 — Present
Arctic Bit AB · Norrköping, Sweden
- Advising and training organizations on platform engineering, observability, cloud-native infrastructure and engineering effectiveness.
- Selected clients include Mindroad, Edument, Axis Communications, Zmarta, and CPA Global.
- Working with engineering organizations on reliability, developer platforms, operational scalability and modern infrastructure practices across distributed systems environments.
- Frequent speaker at international engineering conferences, with 40+ talks delivered across events including KubeCon EU Operator Day, SLOConf, DevOps Pro Europe and Serverless Days.
- Featured guest on engineering podcasts and industry programs, discussing observability, platform engineering, reliability engineering and cloud-native operations.
- Recognized as a Google Developer Expert in the cloud category twice and Docker Captain four years in a row for contributions to the cloud-native ecosystem.
- Maintainer and core contributor to open-source Docker ecosystem projects including containrrr/watchtower and containrrr/shoutrrr, helping grow Watchtower to 24k+ GitHub stars and 1B+ Docker Hub pulls.
- Published writing on platform engineering, observability and socio-technical systems, including work featured by Grafana Labs, Canonical, as well as by O’Reilly.
Tech Lead / Engineering Consultant
Jun 2016 — Dec 2018
HiQ Ace · Linköping, Sweden
- Delivered consulting engagements for clients including Axis Communications and CPA Global, spanning cloud services, enterprise applications, AR, IoT and companion apps, and integration work.
- Organized recurring internal upskilling programs and workshops, increasing the number of certified Scrum practitioners by 80%.
- Selected as one of four to establish a new development center in Linköping, defining engineering processes and architectural standards.
- Designed and implemented a structured technical interview framework to support hiring, improving evaluation consistency and long-term quality standards.
Enterprise Architect
Apr 2012 — Jun 2016
IL Recycling · Norrköping, Sweden
- Progressed from support engineering into Systems Specialist responsibilities within six months, later moving into Enterprise Architect with ownership of architecture and governance for systems supporting sales, billing, accounting, and the M3 Enterprise Collaborator integration platform.
- Accountable for integrations, data flows, vendor coordination, change prioritization, and formal budget responsibility for a systems portfolio of approximately 5 million SEK.
- Held technical responsibility for finance, logistics, and the integration platform, and served as problem manager in the internal ITIL process.
Skills
Leadership & Strategy
- Organizational Design
- Engineering Strategy
- Hiring & Talent Development
- Performance Management
- Agile & DevOps Transformation
- Cross-Functional Leadership
Technical
- Cloud Platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Observability & SRE
- Distributed Systems
- Enterprise Architecture
- Go, JS, TS, Python, C#
- Efficient AI usage
Other
- Public speaking
- Documentation
- UML & modelling
Education
Informatics · Högskolan Dalarna, Falun, Sweden
2013 — 2016
Honors & awards
Docker Captain · Docker Inc
2021 — 2024
Google Developer Expert — Cloud · Google
2022 — 2023
Azure Community & Content Hero · Microsoft
2020
Publications
97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know · Curated by Emily Freeman, O'Reilly Media
Contributor; wrote about improving legacy code without large rewrites.
2021