Iain Mcginniss
Member Of Technical Staff at Anthropic
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIain Mcginniss is an identity and security engineer with 16 years of experience building authentication and authorization systems across major platforms, now a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic in San Francisco. He has led security and identity work at Apple, Gusto, WeWork and Google, shaping features like Smart Lock for Passwords, One Tap sign-up, and native OAuth libraries for mobile. Iain combines deep systems and research pedigree—a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Glasgow—with hands-on engineering from backend services to Android clients. He is an active open-source contributor, notably improving Scala’s compiler docs and hardening the AppAuth-Android SDK for OAuth/OpenID Connect. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic threat modeling, capacity planning and unifying physical and digital access policies into coherent authorization models. He often surfaces subtle UX/security trade-offs early, reducing costly rework in large distributed systems.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at University of Glasgow
Stackoverflow
2,721reputation
368kreached
35answers
4questions
oauth
top-5%
Github Skills (27)
markdown10
mobile-development10
openid-connect10
css10
android-sdk10
java10
scala10
javas10
markdown-it10
pandoc10
html10
oauth10
epub9
pdf9
build-automation9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
openid/AppAuth-Android
Feb 2016 - May 2020
Android client SDK for communicating with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect providers.
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (Android)
Mobile Developer (Android)Contributions:88 commits, 218 PRs, 167 pushes in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Iain primarily contributed to the Android client SDK for OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect providers. Their work included updating tool versions, correcting properties for JavaDoc and keystore configurations. The user also updated the demo app with new branding, removed Google references, refactored the app to focus on a single IDP, and persisted authorization state to shared preferences. Additionally, the user addressed compilation errors and fixed encoding issues in client secret authentication, and improved the code by implementing stricter checks.
openidoidcoauth-2authenticationproviders
scala/scala
Oct 2012 - Mar 2014
Scala 2 compiler and standard library. Scala 2 bugs at https://github.com/scala/bug; Scala 3 at https://github.com/scala/scala3
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:43 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Iain focused on converting the Scala reference documentation from markdown to HTML, PDF, and EPUB formats. They modified the build process to include the new chapters, updated the CSS for improved formatting, and added a table of contents feature. They also updated the build scripts to generate PDF and EPUB versions of the reference and made minor style adjustments to enhance readability and presentation.
functional-programmingobject-oriented-programmingscala-libraryscala-programming-languagestandard-library
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