Experience

Principal engineer and engineering leader with 25+ years shipping high-scale software, from healthcare platforms to games with tens of millions of players. Most recently at The Wildcard Alliance I built the studio's applied-AI systems and the real-time platform behind its live-service title. I work on the platform under the model: durable agent runtimes, evaluation people can trust, and the infrastructure that keeps both affordable.

1. The Wildcard Alliance

   2022 – 2026

   Dallas, TX

   Principal Engineer

   • Architected a real-time viewer engagement platform sustaining 10,000+ concurrent viewers per match during live-streamed matches: a C# WebSocket broker bridging to the UE5 game server, on MongoDB, Redis and Lambda, deployed on Kubernetes.
   • Built the studio's applied-AI systems: an LLM content pipeline on IBM Granite, a vision-model captioning service backed by ChromaDB, MCP servers in daily engineering workflows, and an agent framework (Python, LangChain) that plays live builds in CI and reports findings to Sentry.
   • Drove the studio's AI adoption program, from choosing which workflows to automate through tooling, training and measuring throughput, reaching 80% adoption.
   • Owned the SDLC for a team of 10+ engineers: code review, multi-environment CI/CD on TeamCity, observability with Grafana and Snowflake, incident reporting with Sentry.
   • Designed the title's core backend services: skill-based matchmaking, inventory and progression, server orchestration, telemetry, and the admin portal.

2. PeopleFun

   2021 – 2022

   Plano, TX

   Principal Engineer

   • Led engine-level performance work on Wordscapes, a word-puzzle franchise with tens of millions of monthly players, cutting its memory footprint by 50%.
   • Led the full-stack modernization of BricksnBalls on iOS and Android: Java/Spring Boot services, Unity level-editor tooling, telemetry, and A/B testing on Firebase.
   • Mentored engineers on mobile performance profiling and live-ops practice: incident response, remote configuration and feature flags.

3. Playful Corp

   2013 – 2021

   McKinney, TX

   Principal Engineer

   • Led engineering on Creativerse, a multiplayer voxel open-world game, owning architecture and delivery from development through years of live operation.
   • Built its user-generated content system, which accumulated 100,000+ player contributions, and architected the multi-tenant server orchestration service.
   • Led performance and memory work that supported New Super Lucky's Tale shipping on Nintendo Switch.

4. Newtoy (acquired by Zynga)

   2010 – 2013

   McKinney, TX

   Principal Engineer

   • Shipped features and scaling work on Words With Friends during its peak growth years, on the client and the Rails backend.
   • Architected the iPad version, led the native Android version, and designed the HTML5 port for Facebook.
   • Built an on-device hot-reload system for Lua gameplay scripts used across the With Friends titles.

5. CONEXIS

   2002 – 2010

   IT Architect

   • Architected PCI DSS and HIPAA compliant distributed systems serving 100,000+ users, including a benefits platform with SAML single sign-on and a healthcare EDI (X12N) integration bus.
   • Led the 50+ person engineering organization that delivered them, and the migration off a legacy codebase to C# and .NET.
   • Established CI/CD, automated testing and a standard SDLC across the organization, shortening release cycles.

6. Impact Innovation

   2001 – 2002

   Senior Software Architect

   • Led teams building Microsoft-stack applications, including inventory and asset budgeting for a major hotel chain.

7. KPMG

   2000 – 2001

   Senior Software Architect

   • Designed a global reporting system consolidating and validating data from 200+ locations for real-time reporting.