A team builder at heart. Technical to the core.
Across six studios and fifteen years, the constant has been the same work: building and leading the people who ship games, and the technical backbone they rely on. Twice I led without the title and the team shipped anyway. Most recently I founded a studio and built its entire production system solo, the substrate a team plugs into.
The clearest pattern in my career: I get handed a team, or a gap where a lead should be, and I turn it into something that ships. Here are the two clearest cases.
Promoted to lead engineer in my first year, a peer to the Director of Backend Engineering as his frontend counterpart, both of us reporting to the CTO. I built and led a gameplay team that grew from 4 to 6 or 7 at its peak, and steered it through a round of layoffs and the onboarding that followed without losing delivery.
I promoted three engineers and mentored more than five on their technical growth. I held a 50/50 split between managing and writing Unreal Engine C++, so the team was led by someone still in the code with them.
Beyond the team, I owned client tech strategy up to the C-suite and pushed for generic gameplay systems that later absorbed two full design pivots without a rewrite.
The competitive team had no assigned lead, so I became its de facto technical lead and directed 8 contractors: setting direction, reviewing the work, and keeping delivery unblocked through an informal reporting structure I held together myself.
I also created the framework for AI use across Fortnite's UI engineering org and rolled it out department-wide through presentations and documentation. That was leadership by influence rather than headcount, moving a whole department by building the playbook and teaching it.
Leadership lands better when the team knows you can do the work. Fifteen years of doing it, across proprietary engines, Unreal, and Unity.
Sole UI engineer on Fortnite's in-game HUD refresh. Implemented a rasterization technique for spline-based storm visualization in low-level C++ and custom rendering code, and architected a ViewModel data debugger with the tools team for real-time UI state inspection.
Architected and led a complete front-end rewrite of Vainglory mobile on the proprietary NUO engine, moving a legacy codebase to a modern component system and setting the patterns for widget composition.
Owned full-stack feature work and rebuilt the matchmaking system for War Commander: Rogue Assault using asymmetric ELO scores, client in Unity and C#, server in C#.
Shipped features into FarmVille's monetization pipeline and supported content management system development during the peak of social gaming.
I founded a mobile micro-game studio and built its entire production system myself: the games, and the machine that makes them. A single CLI control plane for every operation, a design-token system shared across the web UI and the game canvas, a codified library of AI agent playbooks, automated test gates, and release engineering with kill switches and runbooks. It is the surface a multidisciplinary team onboards into, built before hiring anyone. The full operations breakdown lives in a companion brief.
The figures above come from a few habits I hold to, in good quarters and bad ones.
I would rather promote and mentor an engineer than backfill from outside. Three promotions and more than five mentees came from treating growth as part of the job, not a perk.
Layoffs and reorgs are when leadership actually shows. I kept a team shipping through both, and I invest in people's growth so the team comes out the other side stronger.
I keep a hands-on split so the team is led by someone who still ships with them. Credibility is earned in review and at the keyboard, not on an org chart.
The best thing I can give a team is tooling and standards that let each specialist move without waiting on me. Zipix is that idea taken to its limit.