I’m Simon Bracegirdle — a software engineer in Perth, Western Australia. I’ve spent 20+ years in product and consulting roles across education, government relations, resources, and the public sector.
AI engineering
I’ve worked on LLM agents, tool orchestration, semantic search, automated briefings, and MCP endpoints. I took a research tool from prototype to production, then built evals, prompt-injection controls, cost caps, usage reporting, and prompt caching.
LLM agents tool use embeddings evals prompt design
Product and platform engineering
I’ve built web applications with React and TypeScript, backend services with Node, NestJS, GraphQL, and REST, and search features with Elasticsearch. The work has included education software, political intelligence products, and a SaaS platform built from scratch.
I’ve also modernised production systems by moving JavaScript to TypeScript, Cypress tests to Playwright, and legacy services into containers.
TypeScript React Node.js GraphQL REST Elasticsearch
Cloud and data
I’ve worked across AWS and GCP. My cloud and data work has included serverless applications, containerised services, ETL and replication pipelines, data lakes, and edge deployments for robotics. I’ve used AWS Glue, dbt, and Snowflake for data platforms, and OpenTelemetry and Datadog for observability.
I’ve written about useful logs and OpenTelemetry.
AWS GCP serverless data pipelines Snowflake OpenTelemetry
Engineering practice
I’ve led engineering practice across product and consulting teams, including architecture, mentoring, CI/CD, trunk-based development, code review, and testing. More recently, I’ve built coding-agent skills, review agents, and definition-of-done checks. I’ve also written about parallel test jobs and code review guidelines.
Elsewhere
My code is on GitHub and the rest of my writing is on the blog.