ETHAN MOTION

ABOUT ME

I'm a senior engineering leader based in Melbourne, Australia, specialising in SRE organisational design, large-scale reliability, and platform strategy within regulated financial environments.

Currently I lead two SRE teams at ANZ responsible for reliability across Retail Banking, Lending, and Product Services across AWS and GCP. I have a proven track record of building high-performing engineering teams, scaling SLO-driven operational practices, and delivering measurable reliability outcomes at production scale.

I lead with empathy first. I believe that people who feel supported and fairly managed do their best work — and that good outcomes for teams, customers, and organisations follow naturally from that.

Portrait of Ethan Motion, Senior Engineering Leader

Key highlights:

  • Led two SRE teams of 12 engineers across critical banking systems
  • Established 300+ SLOs with ~95%+ objectives met over multiple years
  • Reduced database backup and recovery costs by more than $1M annually
  • Designed operational engagement models supporting 15+ service teams
  • Delivered recurring disaster recovery exercises across critical banking systems

Open to senior engineering leadership opportunities. Connect with me on LinkedIn or get in touch directly.

WORK

ANZ

Engineering Manager - SRE - Retail Banking, Lending & Product Services

Lead two SRE teams of 12 engineers responsible for reliability engineering across Retail Banking, Lending, and Product Services at production scale. Drive SRE adoption across SLO governance, incident management, and operational maturity. Define reliability frameworks, engagement models, and operating standards across multiple engineering organisations.

November 2021 -
Present

Xero

Site Reliability Engineer

Improved platform reliability through observability, monitoring, alerting, and automation initiatives across large-scale cloud environments. Built operational tooling and monitoring capabilities to improve service visibility and operational efficiency during periods of significant platform growth.

September 2017 -
November 2021

Xero

Customer Experience Technical Specialist

Provided technical support to Xero customers, raising and prioritising bugs and responding to security incidents. This role also involved Technical Business Improvements to help our CX team scale effectively with the growth of the company.

April 2015 -
September 2017

EDUCATION

Amazon Web Services

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

2018

Computer Power Plus

Diploma in Software Development

2015

NZ Institute of Management

Certificate in Business Management

2011

Project Management Institute

Certified Associate of Project Management

2011

BLOGS