Luke Macken
Head Of Engineering at Phorex, L.L.C.
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLuke Macken is a veteran software leader and Head of Engineering with 20 years’ experience building secure, scalable systems across OS internals, package management, and realtime web applications. He blends deep systems-level expertise in C/C++ and assembly with prolific Python work in machine learning, blockchain, and algo trading, and has driven core backend improvements in notable open-source projects like DNF and PackageKit. As a former Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and longtime open-source contributor, he brings proven experience in security auditing, forensics, and sustaining complex infrastructure. He also runs startups and independent data science work—demonstrating both technical depth and product/market instincts as CEO of Phorex and Head of Trading at ShapeShift. Based in Denver, Luke pairs hands-on coding with strategic leadership, and is comfortable altering low-level metadata flows as well as shipping user-facing backend features. An underappreciated strength is his knack for improving developer UX through focused documentation and tooling contributions that make intricate systems more approachable.
20 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science BS Philosophy Minor, BS Computer Science BS Philosophy Minor at Rochester Institute of Technology
Github Skills (22)
yum10
debug10
back-end-development10
package-management10
python10
dnf10
rpm10
package-manager10
backend10
documentation10
character-encoding9
debugging9
apim9
dbus9
debian9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
lmacken/pyrasite
Sep 2011 - Mar 2017
Inject code into running Python processes
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:293 commits, 10 PRs, 12 pushes in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Luke primarily contributed to documentation updates within the pyrasite repository. Their commits involved modifying the `README.rst` file to improve clarity, update installation instructions, and add information on the new tools. The user also made minor tweaks to comments and corrected the usage of payloads. The commits indicate a focus on improving the user experience and providing better documentation for the project.
pythonpython3injectdebugginggdb
rpm-software-management/dnf
Jun 2006 - May 2008
Package manager based on libdnf and libsolv. Replaces YUM.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Luke primarily contributed to the `dnf` package manager project by modifying and enhancing the metadata handling and update process. They added support for reading and processing 'updateinfo' metadata, integrating it with the system's DBus communication for package updates. The user also refactored the update metadata handling, including DTD updates, and added title and release information. These changes indicate work focused on core package management functionality and metadata processing.
pythonrpmpackage-managerlinuxyum
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.