Philip Southam
Principal Software Engineer at Booking.com
Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
Summary
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SeniorPhilip Southam is a principal software engineer with 14 years of experience and a two-decade span of engineering work that includes leading cloud-native and serverless architectures at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now driving platform initiatives at Booking.com. He has a proven record of architecting scalable data and telemetry systems—introducing TimescaleDB at JPL, building their first production container orchestration platform, and re-architecting high-profile services like the "Send Your Name to Mars" site to cut costs and improve performance. Philip blends hands-on systems engineering in Python and Go with ML/LLM experimentation and large-scale data processing (including curating CommonCrawl subsets for DARPA), earning him NASA honors such as the Exceptional Public Achievement Medal. Earlier in his career he built high-throughput media platforms at ZEFR/Movieclips that handled hundreds of millions of videos and billions of monthly views while leading teams of ~30 engineers. He’s an active pragmatist who ships production-ready solutions, contributes to tooling like a MySQL-to-Postgres migration utility, and favors cost-effective, observable architectures for mission-critical workloads. Based in Utrecht, he pairs deep technical breadth with a consistent focus on operational reliability and measurable impact.
14 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
16,099reputation
1.3mreached
33answers
0questions
mod-wsgi
top-5%
python
top-1%
rabbitmq
top-1%
regex
top-5%
flask
top-1%
jinja2
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
database-migrations10
data-conversion10
postgresql10
python10
mysql10
celery10
rabbitmq10
sql10
database-migration10
flask10
jinja29
regex9
mod-wsgi9
testing8
csv6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
philipsoutham/py-mysql2pgsql
Jul 2011 - Apr 2013
Tool for migrating/converting from mysql to postgresql.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:25 commits in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Philip primarily contributed to the development of a tool for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL. Their work included implementing features for handling different data types, fixing bugs related to escaping special characters and handling boolean values, and improving foreign key handling. They also focused on improving the build process by fixing errors related to importing non-existent libraries and incorporating changes to the test suite.
mysqlasynciosqlpeeweeconverting
philipsoutham/scala-fnv
Oct 2015 - Apr 2019
FNV-1 and FNV-1a hash functions in Scala
Contributions:2 releases, 13 commits, 1 PR in 3 years 7 months
fnvfnv-1ahashscala3hash-functions
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