Leigh Mcculloch
Principal Software Engineer at Stellar Development Foundation
Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLeigh Mcculloch is a Principal Software Engineer with 15 years building resilient payments, blockchain, and infrastructure systems across startups and enterprises. Currently at the Stellar Development Foundation, Leigh has driven core initiatives from Passkey support and Soroban runtimes to developer tooling and wallet backends, while previously leading payments platforms at PayPal and Gumroad. He blends systems-level languages (Go, Rust, Zig, WASM) with production-grade databases and DevOps, and is an active open-source contributor to prominent projects including the Go language and Stellar repositories. Known for pragmatic simplicity and a focus on equitable, open technology, Leigh often surfaces subtle robustness improvements—like whitespace-tolerant XML handling and test-driven refactors—that quietly raise reliability across large systems.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Computer Science Games Technology, Bachelor of Computer Science Games Technology at Charles Sturt University
English
Github Skills (52)
go-modules10
apim10
vlang10
transaction10
transactional10
programming-language10
apidoc10
api-design10
testing10
bash10
language-server-protocol10
java10
cicd10
bash-shell10
javas10
Programming languages (32)
Github contributions (5)
braintree-go/braintree-go
Aug 2016 - Mar 2019
A Go client library for Braintree
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 225 commits, 254 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Leigh contributed to the development of a Go client library for Braintree. Their work involved fixing device data formatting, adding a test to post correlation IDs in device data, and fixing API versioning for Paypal account interactions. The user also added support for creating arbitrary payment methods and added support for handling default payment methods, and introduced new features for managing payment methods.
golangclient-librarygo-clientadyenpayment-processing
stellar/go
Aug 2019 - Jan 2023
Stellar's public monorepo of go code
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 579 reviews, 358 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Leigh primarily worked on back-end development tasks related to the Stellar network and its related services. Their contributions included refactoring code, modifying database interactions, and updating dependencies. They also added new functionality and implemented changes to support SEP-10, a key aspect of the project, while also addressing integration with Firebase for authentication.
horizongolangmonorepoblockchainstellar
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