Hedley Simons

Background

About Hedley Simons

Field Engineer (one of the two co-founders of the Field Engineering team), Office of the CTO member and Wayfinder with the amazing folks at Grafana Labs. As an SME in a range of observability methodologies, with a specialisation in tracing, I enable the GTM team, their prospects and their customers, frequently being brought into high-profile conversations to act as a trusted consultant on product features, architectural design and implementation. Responsible for crucial infrastructure across the GTM team, having co-architected and implemented the internal demonstration environment that includes the entire Grafana product suite. This environment is relied upon by hundreds of members of the organisation every day, but primarily by SEs, OAs and FEs to demonstrate our products to prospects, including thousands of dashboards, data sources and third party integrations. Utilised by engineering as a product expert, I'm included in product interviews and discussions to suggest, comment on and review new features and functionality. To accelerate enablement, I create workshops, webinars, and other content, including the software used to provision them, both internally and externally, as well as speaking at industry conferences and shows. I have also been one of the submission leaders for the demo section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, since Grafana entered it in 2023. As a Wayfinder, I help Hiring Managers and teams ensure that candidates for open positions at Grafana fit our culture, having a passion for improving both themselves and the company as a whole. Finally, I have the honour of being Grafana's first 'boomerang'! Previously a Principal Software Engineer and SRE, highly experienced in embedded and cloud software design and engineering implementation.