Alex Sanford
Senior Software Engineer (Security) at Wikimedia Foundation
Nova Scotia, Canada
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Sanford is a Senior Software Engineer specializing in application security with 15 years of experience building and protecting web platforms. He blends hands-on vulnerability research and secure full‑stack development—PHP, Ruby on Rails, React, and Python—to both ship features and harden them against real-world attacks. At Automattic he led WPScan triage and a private bug bounty, authored ModSecurity and YARA rules, and helped publish dozens of CVEs, while also driving Sensei LMS architecture and a freemium rework that multiplied the user base. Now at Wikimedia Foundation he continues to operate at the intersection of engineering and security, mentoring distributed teams and operationalizing mitigations. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, defensive engineering: automating repetitive tasks, reducing triage time dramatically, and turning incident analysis into proactive protections. Based in Nova Scotia, he pairs academic curiosity (early BCI research) with practical impact across high‑profile open source projects.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma High School/Secondary Diplomas and Certificates, High School Diploma High School/Secondary Diplomas and Certificates at Central Kings High SchoolBachelor of Computer Science (Honours Co-op Option) Computer Science, Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours Co-op Option) Computer Science at Acadia University
English, French
Stackoverflow
3,667reputation
148kreached
37answers
8questions
ruby
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (20)
woocommerce10
wordpress10
lms10
php10
wordpress-plugin10
ruby9
css9
ruby-on-rails9
database-management9
apidoc8
api8
javascript8
git8
shopify6
fog6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
Automattic/sensei
Sep 2017 - Dec 2022
Sensei LMS - Online Courses, Quizzes, & Learning
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 releases, 166 reviews, 532 commits in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the Sensei LMS project, focusing on modifications to the WooCommerce integration. Their work involved changes to button text based on course pricing, improvements to the presentation of quiz feedback, and simplifying CSS for displaying answer feedback. They also added a Babel build process for JavaScript and worked on lesson modules, ensuring proper handling when lessons are moved between courses.
wordpressphpsenseisensei-lmsplugin
Automattic/WP-Job-Manager
Feb 2018 - Jul 2022
Manage job listings from the WordPress admin panel, and allow users to post jobs directly to your site.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 24 reviews, 121 commits in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Alex implemented usage tracking functionality, likely for analytics purposes. They copied code from another project, Sensei, and adapted it to the WP Job Manager plugin. The contributions involve setting up the initialization, data collection, and integration of the usage tracking system, including adding settings and hooks within the WordPress ecosystem. Furthermore, the user contributed to data deletion processes and added code for the submission of data and form fields.
job-listingsadmin-paneladminwordpressphp
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