London · automation engineer · physicist by training
I build AI tools and automation that quietly do the work nobody wants to do by hand — and, in my own time, On The Gate, an app for finding a football match near you.
about
I’m George Mather, a senior automation engineer based in London. I work at the point where large language models meet real business systems: designing tools that take a plain-English request, work out what the person actually wants, and safely run the right workflow.
Most of my week is Python and C#, Microsoft Graph, browser automation and the unglamorous plumbing that makes data move reliably — ingestion, validation, delivery, reporting. I use AI-assisted development every day, and I review what it produces as carefully as I would a colleague’s pull request.
Before any of that I studied Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Exeter, where my master’s dissertation asked whether we could detect a moon orbiting the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b. The habit that stuck: pull a weak signal out of noisy data, then check you haven’t fooled yourself.
Outside work I’m usually at a football ground somewhere down the pyramid, which is where my side project came from.
work
Founding member of the automation team. Built web-scraping and data-pipeline systems with Python, Playwright and Selenium for teams across three countries, and ran the demos that got people using them.
Maintained client data pipelines in R and built the first Python and Excel tools that turned into the automation team.
Dissertation on the detectability of exomoons around Beta Pictoris b. Summer research internship (EPSRC) analysing a Keck Observatory survey for planetary-mass companions. President and Treasurer of PhySoc, a 400-member society.
projects
side project2026 · early version live
A map of live and upcoming football fixtures near you, from the Premier League right down the non-league pyramid. Built for fans who can’t get a ticket to their own club and don’t yet know there’s a fiver-on-the-gate game fifteen minutes away.
Read the write-up → Try it at onthegate.app ↗
day job
An internal chatbot that turns plain-English requests into calls to approved tools and workflows — with the guardrails, validation and human-in-the-loop checks that make it safe to let an LLM press buttons.
research · Exeter
Master’s dissertation modelling satellites of a young giant exoplanet and testing whether photometric analysis could detect them — time-series analysis, signal extraction and noise suppression in Python.
writing
A bounding box, an old navigation formula and plain PostgreSQL: how On The Gate answers “what’s on near me?”
toolkit
contact
Working on something with AI or automation, want to talk about non-league football, or just another George Mather checking out the competition? Email is best.
[email protected]