Simon Phillips

Simon is a hands-on engineering leader with a decade of deep cyber security expertise and a career spanning IT support, software development, infrastructure, and security operations. His journey into technology started in small and medium-sized businesses, where he gained a full-stack understanding of technical environments.

 

His first career move into the field was as a Security Officer for a local council, where he quickly realised the impact well-executed security can have on public services. From there, he moved into penetration testing, an experience that sharpened his offensive and defensive skills and laid the groundwork for his return to internal security. In a pivotal role at an international logistics and manufacturing business, he built an internal security function from the ground up and played a key role in the creation of their Security Operations Center (SOC).

 

Over the years, he’s led high-performing security and infrastructure teams, always with a focus on collaboration, empowerment, and technical excellence. Most recently, he founded and scaled a startup delivering A-Ops - a SaaS security automation platform designed to help lean teams respond more effectively to today’s fast-paced threat landscape. The platform reflected his core philosophy: simplify the complex, automate the repeatable, and make powerful tools more accessible.

 

Now as CTO Engineering at CybaVerse, he brings that same mission-driven mindset. He’s focused on making enterprise-grade security capabilities usable and useful for the MSPs and SMEs that are often left behind by legacy solutions. His vision is clear: to break down technical barriers and enable more organisations to defend themselves with confidence, without needing large in-house teams.

 

Outside the office, you’ll often find him deep in experimentation, whether testing emerging technologies, building proof-of-concepts, or just tinkering with an idea to see how far it can go. For him, learning never stops, especially when it involves rolling up your sleeves and building something new.