detassigny.net
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Gabriel de Tassigny

Staff Engineer · PHP, Symfony & WordPress · since 2012

I build and maintain web platforms for publishers and product teams, from REST APIs and headless WordPress to Gutenberg blocks and Core Web Vitals work. I'm based in Poitiers, France, and have worked remotely with teams in Dublin, London and beyond.

For employers

Hiring a senior engineer?

14 years across agency, product and media companies. Backend depth, frontend fluency, and product-owner experience.

Download CVSee experience

Freelance

Need short-term help?

Limited availability for short WordPress or PHP engagements: plugins and themes, migrations and upgrades, performance audits.

See services

$> git log --career

Experience

  1. Sep 2021 – now(HEAD -> remote)Remote

    Staff Engineer & Product Owner · XWP

    • Builds modern WordPress plugins and themes for large publishers and tech companies, with Gutenberg, React, PHP 8, Sass and TypeScript.
    • Product owner for 14 of the 16 Are Media sites moved from Umbraco to a WordPress multisite (6.2 million monthly users across the programme): planned a year-long launch calendar for a team of five developers, a project manager, a QA engineer and a designer, with accessibility and Core Web Vitals kept in the green. Editors now publish in half the time.
    • Product owner for a GPT-4 integration that turned unstructured restaurant reviews into structured data (JSON-LD) for search, for pennies per review.
    • Improves web performance and Core Web Vitals on high-traffic sites.
    • Helped define the maintenance checklist for client sites, and built an AI agent skill for the team that automates most of it: WordPress core and plugin updates, security checks and Lighthouse performance reviews.
    • Writes user stories and manages and prioritizes the backlog, with internal and client stakeholders across several projects at once, in Scrum and Kanban teams.

    Clients: Twitch, Are Media, Evolve Media, OFX, ButterflyMX, Good Friday Appeal

    • WordPress
    • Gutenberg
    • PHP 8
    • React
    • TypeScript
    • Sass

  2. Jan 2019 – Aug 2021(london)London, UK

    Senior Backend PHP Developer · Immediate Media

    • Co-led the backend design of a new headless architecture for Immediate Media's WordPress multisite (about 100 million monthly users across its sites), launched first on the newly acquired BBC Good Food (about 50 million monthly unique users).
    • Defined the API contracts for the frontend team and built three REST services with API Platform (Symfony), PHP 7.4, MongoDB and Docker: content such as recipes, per-site settings, and users' saved recipes.
    • Built the WordPress side that pushes content to these services automatically whenever a post is published, edited or deleted.
    • Load-tested the services with Artillery and profiled them with Blackfire to handle that traffic, on tight stakeholder deadlines.
    • Set up automated testing at every level, from unit and API tests to end-to-end tests.
    • Developed AWS Lambda functions with Bref for Amazon Alexa.
    • Mentored and coached mid-level developers.
    • PHP 7.4
    • API Platform
    • Symfony
    • MongoDB
    • WordPress
    • Docker
    • AWS Lambda
    • Artillery
    • Blackfire
    • Node.js
    • React

  3. Feb 2018 – Nov 2018(dublin)Dublin, Ireland (remote from South Korea)

    Senior Backend Engineer · Distilled SCH

    • Built microservices with Java 8 and Spring Boot, deployed on Kubernetes.
    • Worked fully remote from South Korea with three overlapping hours a day, in a Scrum team.
    • Java 8
    • Spring Boot
    • Kubernetes

  4. Dec 2014 – Feb 2018(dublin)Dublin, Ireland

    PHP Developer on daft.ie · Distilled SCH

    • Developed and maintained daft.ie, Ireland's largest property website, through the upgrade from PHP 5.3 to 7.1.
    • Led development on several medium-sized projects.
    • Was the main contributor to the internal REST API, built with Slim and OpenAPI.
    • Introduced best practices such as TDD, design patterns and SOLID.
    • PHP 5.3–7.1
    • Slim
    • OpenAPI
    • MySQL
    • PHPUnit

  5. Jan 2012 – Sep 2014(paris)Paris, France

    Full-stack Web Developer · DirectStreams

    • Built an extranet with Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Bootstrap.
    • Developed REST APIs.
    • Was the main maintainer of the legacy PHP 5.3 platform.
    • Worked in a Scrum team of four developers.
    • Ruby on Rails
    • PHP 5.3
    • jQuery
    • Bootstrap

Certifications

Education

$> ls ~/projects

Projects

$> git log --author=gdetassigny --all-repos

Open source

On wordpress.org

Contributions

$> tail ~/blog

Writing

Read the blog →

$> composer show --tree

Skills

Backend
  • PHP 8.x (and legacy upgrades from 5.3)
  • Symfony
  • API Platform
  • Slim
  • Node.js
WordPress
  • Plugins
  • Block themes
  • Gutenberg blocks
  • Headless
  • WP-CLI
Frontend
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • HTML
  • CSS / Sass
  • Core Web Vitals
Data
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • SQLite
Testing
  • TDD
  • PHPUnit
  • Playwright
  • API tests
  • Load tests (Artillery)
  • Profiling (Blackfire)
DevOps
  • GitHub Actions
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Linux
Previously
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Ruby on Rails
Languages
  • French (native)
  • English (fluent)
  • Korean (conversational)

$> man hire

Freelance services

Available with limited capacity, for short engagements. I work in small, reviewable steps, write tests, and leave documentation so you're never locked in.

$> mail contact

Contact

The quickest way to reach me is by email, about a role or a short freelance engagement.

Email meCV (PDF)French version