Joshua Rutz | Keynote

Technical Director · Team builder

Joshua
Rutz

Fifteen years in games. Six studios. One founder.

Building teams, and the games they ship.

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What I've led

Teams, first.

The leadership record, before the engineering.

6-7

Engineers led at peak, grown through layoffs and onboarding

0

Contractors directed with no assigned lead above me

0

Engineers promoted from within the team

5+

Mentored on technical growth and direction

0

Systems survived major design changes (Manticore, Fortnite)

15+

Years shipping, from FarmVille to Fortnite

Manticore Games and Epic Games.

I've led by title, and I've led by trust.

A team builder at heart, and still in the code with them.

Epic Games · Fortnite · Hundreds of millions of players

I overhauled the HUD every player sees.

A ground-up refresh of Battle Royale's most-used HUD elements, built on UE5's existing UI architecture with stable, proven engineering.

Epic Games · Fortnite

The storm was always a circle.

So I built a custom rendering pipeline that draws arbitrary storm shapes on the minimap. Now the safe zone can close in as a boomerang, an arrow, or whatever design imagines.

Epic Games · Cross-team engineering

Built for one mode. Then every team wanted in.

Battle Royale

Zero Build

Reload

OG

The refresh started for Battle Royale alone. When other modes wanted in mid-flight, I architected the flags that let each team switch to the new HUD on its own schedule. A technical change that was really a cross-team logistics problem, solved in the design.

Up to 7

Team led

Manticore Games · Out of Time

Lead engineer on the gameplay team.

Promoted to lead in year one as the client-side UE5 gameplay lead, a peer to the Director of Backend Engineering. Built a team of four into seven, and held it together through layoffs without losing delivery.

Super Evil Megacorp