I'm Simon Betton, a principal software engineer in Auckland with over 19 years of experience across backend and frontend. I design architecture that stays simple as products and teams grow, focusing on technical strategy, clear system design, and the long-term decisions that keep code maintainable.

Such is a non-custodial Ðogecoin wallet for iOS and Android with merchant invoicing and payments. As founding engineer and principal, I set the technical strategy and architecture for the React Native platform, from the first commit through the build and release pipeline, and led the engineering conventions, ADRs, and quality gates the team works to. The boundaries are strict enough that a growing team, and AI agents, ship in parallel without the architecture drifting.

OnlyDoge is an open-source Ðogecoin block explorer and analytics platform with a tool-using AI analyst, built alone on a custom indexer and a ClickHouse warehouse. The chat runs a bounded tool loop: eight read-only tools, hard step and time ceilings, and every chain fact traced to a tool result rather than model memory. The model composes SQL for aggregate questions and the platform validates the AST before anything runs, and financial-advice requests are refused by a deterministic classifier before the model is ever invoked.

KiwiCV is a free service that turns the CVs migrants already have into ones written for New Zealand employers. I built it alone as a nine-stage durable pipeline on Inngest: OCR and multimodal extraction, a human step where the customer confirms their career facts, then rewriting through a gateway with a three-vendor fallback chain and structured output as the contract at every boundary. A fail-closed evidence gate audits each claim against the confirmed facts, and if two repair rounds cannot fix it, nothing is saved.

OneTwo builds the enterprise automation ANZ Australia uses to process home loan applications. I was Technical Lead of one of four engineering teams, and domain lead and architect for HLQ, the workflow platform: the orchestration engine that moves each application through its stages (driven by a versioned, human-readable rules language), the integrations with the bank's lending systems, and the human-in-the-loop interface where staff handle review tasks and manual fallbacks. Every step and action is timed and auditable, and no customer data reaches the logs.

GetSetUp is a live and on-demand classroom for older adults. As Technical Lead on the platform rewrite I designed the GraphQL backend-for-frontend and the Presentation API that built every page's layout and section shapes server-side, so web, mobile, and the live-class lobby rendered the same page from one contract and editorial changes needed no frontend release. Across a microservice platform on EKS I was code owner for the content layer, class sessions with Zoom, the admin app, partner attribution, the event pipeline into Amplitude and Zendesk, and GetSetUp Embedded for partners like AOL.

Plant & Food Research is a state-owned New Zealand research institute working on agriculture and food systems. As lead developer at DDB I designed and built its public platform on Contentful, with a highly customisable content model carrying a large volume of research content. Algolia served that content fast with near-unlimited filtering, so visitors could cut across the whole catalogue without waiting on the CMS.

GeminAI Rising is an online learning game for grades 7-9, built by DDB for Alberta Health Services to teach problem-solving and coping skills. It arrived about 90% complete and unstable. As Technical Lead I rebuilt the server and real-time session layer from scratch, kept the React screens worth keeping, and shipped a version that holds a full lesson on flaky school networks. It still runs in Alberta classrooms.

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise is the government agency that helps New Zealand businesses grow internationally. In 2020 I led the engineering at DDB on its investment platform, built on Next.js, TypeScript, and Contentful, which connects New Zealand businesses and Māori enterprises with partners and capital and presents New Zealand opportunities to overseas investors.

Re:scam is an autonomous email bot that wastes scammers' time, and it never generates prose. As Tech Lead at DDB in 2018 I designed the workflow for NetSafe: forwarded emails land on SQS, are scored for scam likelihood and sentiment with IBM Watson, matched to an approved human-written reply through Algolia, and sent back with the conversation state held in DynamoDB, so the bot can shift tactics as the exchange develops. I then led the licensed rebuild for Westpac Australia.

Fight for Territory was an installation at Auckland International Airport for the 2017 Lions tour: stand in front of a camera and your face claims a screen for the All Blacks or the Lions. As Technical Lead at DDB I built the whole system, from computer vision on 65 Raspberry Pis to the 4K signage, the real-time state API between them, and the ops dashboard, with fallbacks so a dropped camera never left a blank screen.

McDonald's New Zealand offers free in-store Wi-Fi nationwide on Vodafone's network: 30 minutes a day for guests, unlimited for mymacca's members. At DDB I built the captive portal that authenticated every guest and member and handed them to Vodafone, then rebuilt it against the new mymacca's account platform during the migration without interrupting access in any store.

Command the Unsullied was a Game of Thrones campaign for Sky, in partnership with Twitter: thousands of Unsullied Army accounts answered #CommandTheUnsullied in real time. At DDB I built the platform behind it, a dashboard on Twitter's Streaming API that let the team craft replies and broadcast thousands of messages, retweets, and follows as the Unsullied army while the conversation was still moving.

Buzzdial was a second-screen platform that let broadcasters measure live audience sentiment while a show was on air. In 2014, before serverless and before infrastructure as code was common, two engineers had to take hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers arriving within minutes of a broadcast. I shipped the first version in four weeks and built the platform end to end, from the widget to the per-second sentiment pipeline and auto-scaling AWS. It held 99.99% availability under 400 milliseconds for Seven, ITV, and the All Blacks.

TVNZ OnDemand was New Zealand's first on-demand streaming app for phones and tablets, released in 2013 on Brightcove App Cloud. Devices had a fraction of today's memory, WebKit had no JIT, and React Native did not exist. As sole developer I owned the client-side architecture for the iPhone and iPad apps, working directly with Brightcove on their video technology, and got a full streaming catalogue running smoothly inside those limits. Each app reached #1 on its store chart and won multiple Best Awards.