Hi, my name is Sam
Principal Magento Engineer
Platform Engineering / DevOps / SRE / Security / Performance
I'm a Principal Magento Engineer doing full-stack work across the Magento ecosystem. Bespoke modules, checkout customizations, Admin UI stuff, platform architecture, hosting infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, you name it.
Working from the UK between Portsmouth and Cardiff, with 8+ years of professional experience specialising in building scalable, secure, low-cost infrastructure for Magento and PHP-based platforms.
Fair warning: this blog started as a playground for me to mess around with SEO and content writing. Don't treat anything here as gospel - it's more documentation & rambling of things I've tried than definitive guides.
Some Achievements
Infrastructure & Platform
- High-availability Magento infrastructure with 99.99% uptime at SMB-friendly cost levels
- Self-hosted, cost-optimized infrastructure including Sentry, OpenVPN, and ELK stack
- Infrastructure migrations from single-host deployments to autoscaling multi-service architectures
- Centralized backup system with cold storage distribution, lifecycle management, and alerting
Security
- Security disclosures to Adobe, Amasty, and Mirasvit addressing arbitrary file upload, RCE, and XSS
- Emergency patching frameworks for critical vulnerabilities including CosmicSting and SessionReaper
- Automated malware scanning pipelines integrated into CI/CD workflows
Automation & DevOps
- Zero Downtime Deployment pipeline for Magento 2, replacing manual SSH deployments
- CI/CD pipelines with quality gates (APM metrics, Web Vitals, security scanning, code reviews)
- Ephemeral feature-branch environments and local development tooling using Warden.dev
- CLI tools for syncing anonymized production data to local and QA environments
- Playwright-based E2E testing framework tailored to individual store requirements
- Multiple open-source contributions to Magento/MageOS, Warden, and bespoke modules
Development & Technical Leadership
- Bespoke checkout flows and quotation platforms tailored to specific business requirements
- Performance optimizations and cache improvements across Magento applications
- Mentoring engineers and leading code reviews to maintain high technical standards
- Custom Magento modules including Amasty Shipping Debugger, Carding Attack Mitigation, and Local Dev Media Proxying
Scout
Outside of the mundane software world, I have a 1 year old Belgian Malinois called Scout. Who is currently in the process of tackling a Mantrailing certification, ahead of being a quality Search and Rescue pair.
