Simon Aronsson
Engineering Leader
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
- Launched, staffed and paved the ground for the Developer Relations program at k6.
- Built a process for constructing roadmaps and a community impact review framework.
- Launched a full revamp of the product documentation, the weekly k6 office hours YouTube show, and the k6 extension ecosystem offering.
- In early 2021, we were acquired by Grafana to strengthen their story around performance and reliability engineering.
Senior Engineering Consultant
Jan 2018 — Jan 2020
Arctic Bit AB · Norrköping, Sweden
- Provided consulting services, training and coaching in software development, system architecture, agile coaching, and Linux.
- Delivered workshops and mentoring around Engineering Excellence to customers including Axis Communications, Informator, MindRoad, Edument, Advania, and HiQ Ace.
- Frequently spoke at industry conferences — over 20 sessions in 2019 alone.
Senior Engineering Consultant
Jul 2016 — Dec 2017
HiQ Ace · Linköping, Sweden
- Delivered consulting engagements across enterprise clients, focusing on software development, agile transformation, and engineering excellence.
- 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.
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 — 2024
Azure Community Hero · Microsoft
2022
Publications
97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know · Curated by Emily Freeman, O'Reilly Media
2021