Roddeh

Welcome to the site of Simon Rodwell, a Brisbane (Meanjin) based engineering leader with over 25 years experience. I have done everything from hands-on development through to running engineering organisations of 60 people, and for the past three years my focus has been AI.

What I have done...

I have worked across startups, agencies and big tech. I was an early employee at Airtasker (Employee #8), where I led the front end rebuild of the website. At Amazon in Seattle I managed the team responsible for the amazon.com Checkout experience, a platform handling hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions annually across more than 20 regions. As an Amazon "Bar Raiser" I conducted over 800 interviews and helped shape hiring practices across the company. Back in Australia I joined AWS to build proofs of concept for public sector customers, from public transport usage prediction to command and control for a fleet of law enforcement robots (seriously).

At Employment Hero I led the core technology teams (Authorization, Infrastructure, Design Systems, Web and Mobile Platform, Architecture and QA), around 60 people spread across four countries. Earlier in my career I co-founded a digital agency and a custom t-shirt startup, and became the first merchant in Australia to accept Bitcoin.

I work best close to product, partnering with product managers and designers to shape what customers actually experience, not just how it gets built. I care deeply about developing people and hiring the very best talent.

Fractional CTO

I offer my services as a "Fractional CTO", bringing senior technical leadership to your business without the cost of a full time hire. Most recently I led the engineering team at Scout Talent Group two days per week, taking them from autocomplete to agentic workflows, building AI into their products, and teaching staff from non-technical backgrounds to build with AI. I can lead your team, set your technical direction, improve how you hire, and still roll up my sleeves to write code and set up infrastructure, on a part-time basis that suits your needs and budget.

AI for Your Business

Many businesses know AI should be helping them but aren't sure where to start. I help teams find the places where AI genuinely saves time, and the places where it doesn't, then build practical solutions that work in the real world. That covers both how your team works day to day and the products you ship to your customers.

I am currently offering a limited number of free, on-site AI diagnostics for local businesses. Find out more.

Software Engineer

As a software engineer I can lead the design and implementation of your solution. I have particular strengths in the following areas:

• Full Stack Development with a preference for Javascript/Typescript
  • Front End: React, ShadCN, Radix-ui, ThreeJS, PixiJS, D3...
  • Back End: NodeJS, Express...
• Cloud Architecture on AWS
  • Serverless: Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, API Gateway, Cognito...
  • Infrastructure as Code: CloudFormation, CDK
• AI
  • LLM integration and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Agentic development with coding agents
• Security
  • ISO 27001 controls and engineering practices

Recent Projects

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