PSF hires Joshua Mcshannon as infrastructure engineer for PyPI, python.org

The Python Software Foundation has added Joshua Mcshannon as a full-time Infrastructure Engineer, reporting to Director of Engineering Jacob Coffee. Mcshannon brings more than 16 years of experience spanning bootstrapped startups and large technology companies, with recent work in AI-integrated cybersecurity education and DevOps platform engineering. His role addresses a critical staffing gap: the PSF has operated its core community infrastructure without dedicated infrastructure engineering redundancy.

Mcshannon's immediate responsibilities include reducing operational complexity across PSF services, optimizing systems that CPython core developers and staff depend upon, and adding redundancy to on-call rotations. He has already begun work on the organization's Kubernetes infrastructure with a focus on cost optimization. The services under his purview include python.org, the Python Package Index (PyPI), and infrastructure supporting PyCon US.

Infrastructure scope and operational priorities

• PyPI and python.org operations: Mcshannon will directly manage infrastructure for the Python Package Index and the main python.org site, which serve millions of daily requests from Python developers worldwide.
• Kubernetes cost optimization: He has already begun analyzing the PSF's Kubernetes deployments to identify cost-reduction opportunities, indicating container orchestration is central to current infrastructure.
• On-call rotation redundancy: The hire explicitly addresses a single point of failure in PSF operations, adding capacity for 24/7 incident response that was previously stretched across limited staff.
• PyCon US infrastructure: The role extends to event-specific infrastructure for the foundation's flagship conference, suggesting broader platform engineering responsibilities beyond persistent services.
• CPython developer platforms: Internal tooling used by core Python maintainers falls under this infrastructure scope, bridging developer productivity and public-facing service reliability.

Why it matters

Dedicated infrastructure staffing at the PSF strengthens the operational backbone of PyPI, which hosts over 500,000 packages and is critical to global software supply chains. This hire reduces burnout risk for existing staff and creates capacity for infrastructure modernization that has been deferred due to resource constraints, directly benefiting Linux distribution packagers, CI/CD pipelines, and millions of developers who depend on Python ecosystem availability.