Senior Programmer at Sound Games

December 2025 - Present

Sound Games is a startup game studio, publisher, and more. As a programmer I work with designers, artists, and business folks to establish a shared vision and make that vision a reality.

Games were primarily built in Unity and C#. I also worked in Godot Engine/GDScript when investigating porting opportunities and Kotlin when working on a web application.

Go Ape Ship!

Steam Store Page. Also available on Epic Game Store, Google Play Store, and Apple App Store

Go Ape Ship! is a frantic co-op multiplayer game for one to eight players. I joined Sound Games as we were polishing the game for release. To that end I:

  • Ramped up quickly to squash dozens of bugs in a short time frame.

  • Refactored several networking-dependent systems so the game would no longer break catastrophically when the original host left a game.

  • Refactored the input modules so that input rebinding and button prompt glyphs functioned correctly across all platforms.

  • Refactored camera input processing across mouse, gamepad, and touch to be responsive and smooth.

  • I built and published for all game stores.

Lumines Remastered Mobile Port

Apple App Store and Google Play Store

Groove to electronic jams while strategically dropping blocks before the BPM bar sweeps combos clean after each measure. For this port I:

  • Added an auto-save feature for in-progress games. Mobile sessions are much shorter than the average PC session, so to get through longer game modes this was necessary. This work required identifying all state data necessary to resume an in-progress game session which was quite a challenge!

  • Integrate Google and Apple platform services for authentication, cloud saves, achievements, and leaderboards.

Other Work

  • I investigated the scope of porting a few games to characterize if they were the right opportunity for our business. This included games built in Unity and Godot.

  • Shipmate: a cross-platform game publishing tool.

    • Hacked Steam to create a data pipeline for uploading store page data.

    • Leveraged Google REST APIs to upload data to Google Play Console.

    • Added an image manipulation package so that you can upload screenshots once and have them automagically convert to the proper format per-platform

    • This work was in the Kotlin language and leveraged the Ktor framework.

Senior+ Programmer and Leader at Rec Room

June 2022 - October 2025

Rec Room was the best place to build and play games together. It was available across VR, PC, Consoles, and Mobile platforms. It shut down on 1 June 2026.

As a programmer and leader I worked with designers, artists, and business folks to make the business profitable. I served in many different roles.

Rec Room was built with Unity and C#.

Creation UX Team Software Architect

  • Partnered with a Design Lead to rebuild the Mobile Creation UX from the ground up. This replaced the original VR-first UX with touchscreen native controls and workflows.

  • Investigated feature ambitions to establish scope. Then I would either write the feature or system myself or form a team and lead them through implementation.

  • Characterized memory usage and reduced Creation UX memory footprint by 50%.

  • Refactored the code so that there were clear interfaces and module boundaries. This enabled the backend team to replace their object-oriented systems with Unity's data-oriented technology stack.

  • Mentored junior and mid-level engineers through feature development, system design, and career goals.

  • Ramped up on a large legacy code space to be responsible for its ongoing care.

AI Gameplay Research Team Leader

I collaborated with the Creative Director and Art Director to investigate the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI (image and 3d model generators) in the context of gameplay and user-generated content. I lead a team of engineers to ship new experiences quickly to millions of players to learn what might work. We collaborated with core technology teams to publish AI tooling so that our player creators could also leverage these cutting-edge AI tools for their own experiences.

Other Work

  • I embedded on the Avatar Team as a programmer to profile and solve memory usage as we were transitioning to a new avatar body system. In this role I improved performance and memory usage until the new avatar type was more efficient than the legacy avatar type.

  • I briefly served as the Creation UX Team People Manager when the previous manager moved to a new role.

Senior Programmer at Arcadia Games

January 2022 - May 2022

Arcadia Games was a startup courting mega-IP partners to create a multiplayer metaverse similar to the Disney Infinity series. I was a lead engineer for pre-production work on character, controls, and camera work. I solved for considerations of working with hundreds of character skins with unique per-character abilities in many control contexts. I collaborated closely with designers and other engineers as we built our game tech stack.

I also researched and built our tech stack for cross-cutting conerns such as core input and effect sequence modules.

Unfortunately my time at this startup was short due to the business running out of capital.

Senior Programmer in Quality, XR at Unity Technologies

January 2018 - December 2021

I was hired to bring the perspective of a Unity user into engine development.  I led game jams to explore the robustness of new features. I developed tools and pipelines to ensure quality releases.

  • OpenXR Quality Lead - Implemented an end-to-end automated pipeline for testing Unity’s OpenXR support for Input, Graphics, and General Function test categories across a multitude of partner runtimes.

  • Engaged with the OpenXR Khronos group to bring application developers’ perspective and drive the creation of new extensions. Drove an extension that became part of the OpenXR 1.1 Core Specification.

  • For each major release of Unity Editor, I organized and managed ad-hoc teams of 2-8 through a week-long exercise to make a game using new features as a free-form integration test. We generally identified 30+ actionable items to resolve before release.

  • I managed teams during the annual Unity Global Hack Weeks. In 2020 my team explored editor extension tools by replicating features from the Half-Life: Alyx level editor.  In 2019 I was part of a mega-team creating a new feature.  I led the subteam, composed of summer interns, that developed a game highlighting that feature.

  • Responsible for mentoring new members of the team to bring them up to speed with VR concepts and working at Unity.

Hardware Architect at VRstudios

November 2015 - January 2018

I was hired to bring embedded engineering experience to this fledgling startup.  Collaboration with Universal Studios Orlando and Knott’s Berry Farm led to first-of-their-kind VR attractions at these major theme parks.

  • Hardware Development Lead for the VRstudios Arena.  This product is a 60ft x 40ft, 8 player, free-roam virtual reality arena.  Collaborated with the Executive Team to define specifications and business goals. Collaborated with the Core Software Team to identify and aid in extending the VRstudios AMP system to support this platform.  Collaborated with the Content Team to imagine the content and work in features to support their game design.

  • Inventor of a patent-pending configurable module system which allows many distinct players for the VRstudios Arena product.  This patented technology also resulted in the most precise tracking technology yet developed by VRsudios.  Development included a Unity/C# tool to analyze complex geometric tracking configurations.

  • Architected and proof-of-concepted a many-to-one XBee and ARM Cortex M4 based peripheral system for use in the VRstudios Arena.

  • Upgraded the generic VRstudios peripheral from an Arduino-based system to a PIC microcontroller based system.  This required a deep dive into the USB specification, and included sophisticated haptic controls.

  • Created a Unity camera placement tool to rigorously analyze tracking camera configurations for the VRstudios Arena product.  This tool was leveraged not just for the Arena product, but to revisit assumptions about camera placement for the Arcade product which proved false.  Built using C#. GPU instancing and physics collision optimizations allowed realtime visual updates of massive amounts of tracking volume analysis information.

  • Reverse engineered Vive USB packets to capture IMU data as a proof-of-concept for possible Vive integration into the VRstudios Arena product.

  • Hardware Development Lead for Universal Studios Orlando Halloween Horror Nights project.  A deep collaboration with Universal Studios’ attraction designers led to a first of its kind haunted house experience for their event.  Upgraded the VRstudios 1280x800 wireless HMD to a 1920x1080 wireless HMD and identified special construction techniques that allowed VRstudios to create its first 4-player experience.

  • Hardware Development Lead for Knott’s Berry Farm “Showdown In Ghost Town” installation.

  • Developed an End-to-end Latency Tester: Created a small device and Unity C# tool to measure the complete VRstudios system pipeline from user movement to photon emission.  This allowed accurate measurement of latency mitigation techniques across the entire VRstudios system, which enabled all team members to better understand the impact of their design choices in complete context. 

  • Took deep dives into the following specifications: USB, USB-HID, USB-PID, HDMI, Bluetooth, ARM Cortex, and PIC.

Logic Design Engineer at IBM

July 2012 - November 2015

Member of the PCIe Center of Competence–a group that develops the PCIe design for IBM’s System Zprocessor, IBM’s Power Server Processor, and various ASIC IO cards that differentiate System Z Mainframes from competitor products by driving performance multiplying IO techniques.

  • Manager’s Choics Award 2014 for the IBM Practice “Show a Personal Interest”

  • Drive IBM’s PCIe roadmap. Prioritize, delegate, and complete tasks related to architecting and implementing new PCIe endpoint and root device pipelines that drive high performance IO systems in the next generation of IBM products. Design and Execute Designer Simulation of created RTL macros
    to streamline the formal verification process.

  • Execute RTL designs based on the IBM practices of Recoverability, Availability, and Serviceability.

  • Collaborate to discuss and evolve specifications during the implementation and verification processes to create a more robust product.

  • Seek and Participate in Mentorship relationships both as a mentor to newer employees and as a mentee of more experienced employees.

  • 3 patents pending approval when I left for my next opportunity.