Philip Mcmahon
Staff Software Engineer at The Guardian
Bristol, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhilip Mcmahon is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years’ experience building secure, production-grade systems at The Guardian, currently focused on Digital Investigations and Reporting. He blends hands-on full‑stack development in Typescript, Scala and Python with deep AWS and DevOps expertise—CDK, ECS/Fargate, Lambda and cost/monitoring tooling—and runs an on‑prem Kubernetes stack supporting secure collaboration. His recent work includes Qubes OS integrations for SecureDrop, a Whisper‑based transcription service, and the Giant document search (Elasticsearch/Neo4j) used for investigative journalism, plus frequent story‑driven data tooling and web scraping. He’s a prolific contributor to The Guardian’s high‑traffic frontend and image management projects, comfortable moving between low‑level ops, cloud migrations and user‑facing features. Based in Bristol with an MEng from the University of Bristol, he’s quietly obsessed with squeezing problems down to reproducible, auditable pipelines—and admits to writing more bash than is probably healthy.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Science, 1st, Master of Engineering - MEng, Computer Science, 1st at University of Bristol
French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
javascript10
croppie10
back-end-development10
css10
image-cropper10
cropperjs10
crop-image10
front-end-development10
angularjs10
html10
cropper10
imageio9
scripting9
image9
xhtml9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
guardian/frontend
Apr 2017 - Jan 2023
The Guardian DotCom.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 529 commits, 300 PRs in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily contributed to the frontend of The Guardian DotCom repository by adding features and improving the user interface. Their work included implementing a weekend crossword type, modifying existing navigation elements, and enhancing the rendering of rich links and image handling within the site. The user also addressed functionality improvements and made minor infrastructure and backend changes, such as modifying an API to use a Fastly configuration and adding an asset route.
productionguardian
guardian/grid
Dec 2016 - Oct 2020
The Guardian’s image management system
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 14 PRs, 23 pushes in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and functionality of the image management system. They implemented features related to custom cropping, including adding custom ratio parameters and integrating them into the search and image views. The user also refactored code, removing unused dependencies and simplifying logic related to crop settings and options within the application, including both front-end and back-end updates. The contributions spanned changes to both JavaScript and shell scripts, suggesting a focus on both front-end and back-end aspects.
management-systemproductionguardianimage-management
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.