Paul McGuire earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a master's in manufacturing systems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. During his career, he has worked primarily in manufacturing systems applications for such companies as General Electric, Fairchild Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, Sematech, and KLA-Tencor.

After dabbling in Python, Paul decided to pursue his interest in text processing, and developed the pyparsing class library. This project has taken on a life of its own and has been downloaded more than 87,000 times. Paul has enjoyed hearing from pyparsing users in the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Russia, the Czech Republic, France, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Finland, Poland, Denmark, Australia, Slovenia, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Paul is currently a senior software developer at Zenoss, Inc., developing Python-based system administration and service monitoring software.