Matthew Landauer
Founder at openaustralia
New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Landauer is a founder and seasoned engineering leader with 18 years of experience building production software, developer tools, and visual effects technology across startups, film studios, and government digital transformation. With a PhD in Physics from Cambridge, he blends rigorous research instincts with pragmatic engineering—shipping everything from Academy-recognised film collaboration tools to infrastructure automation and Freedom of Information systems. He co-founded the OpenAustralia Foundation and led product and delivery teams at Australia’s Digital Transformation Office, demonstrating a rare mix of civic tech, product leadership, and hands-on backend development. His open-source contributions span well-known projects like Alaveteli, Ansible, and Chef, where he focuses on backend robustness, edge-case handling, and maintainability. Matthew’s background in VFX pipeline and on-set R&D gives him a deep appreciation for tooling that accelerates creative work and scales reliably in production. He’s equally comfortable refactoring critical package providers as he is designing user-focused civic platforms—often surfacing practical solutions born from physics-trained problem solving.
18 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Physics, PhD, Physics at University of CambridgeBA, Physics and Theoretical Physics, First-class honours, BA, Physics and Theoretical Physics, First-class honours at Clare College, Cambridge University
Github Skills (20)
python10
package-management10
freebsd10
testing10
ruby10
chef-client10
automation10
dns10
ansible10
activerecord10
chef-solo10
ansible-galaxy10
automations10
apim9
configuration-management9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
mysociety/alaveteli
Sep 2012 - Mar 2021
Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:532 commits, 4 PRs, 10 comments in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the backend logic of the "alaveteli" project, focusing on functionality related to calculating due dates for Freedom of Information requests. They extracted methods, refactored code, and introduced configurations for managing the number of days and type of days (working or calendar) used in these calculations. Additionally, the user implemented testing, including the addition of time objects, for verifying the implemented logic. This indicates a focus on the core functionality and maintainability of the backend codebase.
freedom-of-informationalavetelirequestjurisdictionaccess-to-information
chef/chef
Feb 2009 - Mar 2009
Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:36 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the Chef Infra repository, focusing on the FreeBSD package provider. Their work involved refactoring and extracting methods, specifically related to retrieving package versions and managing service enabling within the FreeBSD environment. They also implemented fixes for enabling services and improved the extraction of candidate package versions from ports. This demonstrates a focus on improving the functionality and maintainability of the Chef FreeBSD package and service resources.
devopsdeploymentansibleinfrastructureinfra
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