Matthew Walker Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

Developing and supporting back-end distributed systems based on Java/Python running in AWS via Kubernetes and EC2... and so much more every day.

San Francisco, California, Us

Development and support of Zynga's core infrastructure systems. Java|Python|Docker|Kubernetes|AWS|MySQL

Austin, Texas, Us

Implemented, refactored, and debugged various features of the core ML job runtime. This provides a execution abstraction on top of against AWS Batch, Kubernetes, and Rancher orchestrators backed by AWS and Azure cloud providers.Developed method and framework for automated (CI) testing of the core ML job runtime, which had been largely untestable because of tech debt. Championed improvements in engineering practices through code reviews and peer mentoring. Focused on reducing coupling and increasing testability through dependency injection and minimizing reliance on global state. Also championed and facilitated increased adoption of automated testing and static code analysis to improve code quality.

Redwood City, Us

Server engineer for the Defiance MMO, charged with optimizing and scaling the game's back-end services and architecture.

Contract server development for the mobile title Creature Quest. This is probably the smallest dev team I've worked on, and also one of the most productive. While working with the team, I:* Helped ship Creature Quest and support the live product.* Implemented server-side game play logic for the guild system.* Built an integration testing system to validate complex game play interactions.* Championed automated testing as a first-class development practice.* Created a load testing tool and framework for simulating complex player behavior at scale.* Implemented code consistency standards and tools for the team.I've also added a few more tools to my kit:* Node.js* Javascript* MongoDB* Docker* AWS/ECSOur initial agreement was for about 9 months, but grew into an 18 month engagement that I was proud to be a part of.

Austin, Texas, Us

Evaluated third-party server platform offering for potential new title. Recommended a strategy for adoption that focused on iterative experimentation with the product and incremental growth of the architecture with increased scale.

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Gb

Consulted on high-level server architecture for a potential new title.

Victoria, British Columbia, Ca

Designed and implemented server-side game and infrastructure systems for the War Commander: Rogue Assault and Game Services Platform teams. Implemented subsystem for retrieving server-side game content from heterogeneous data stores. Implemented chat service in Scala and Akka. Integrated game services with enterprise logging infrastructure using Kafka, Flume and custom Log4J plugin.Improved and optimized our automated server deployment process using Puppet and Bash. Implemented a developer tool set for simulating production deployments on developer machines using Vagrant, Chef, Puppet, and Bash. Refactored and optimized our Maven-based build system to improve both developer and CI build times. Performed comparative analysis of legacy JVM stack with candidate C#/Mono microservice-based stack. Contributed to migration from legacy JVM stack to C#/Mono Microservice stack. Implemented data access layer for Microservice stack using C#. Rewrote legacy Chat service in C# for Microservice stack. Implemented custom distributed performance testing framework based on NUnit using C# and Redis. Integrated StatsD metrics collection API into our service code. Created Grafana dashboards for presentation of perf testing metrics. Generally championed automated testing practices to the server team.Performed detailed analysis and debugging of runtime- and platform-specific performance problems using the Mono and MSVS profilers and custom experiments. Identified significant performance bottlenecks that occurred only on Mono and recommended solutions. Conducted general performance testing using ApacheBench and the NUnit-based framework.Mentored other engineers and championed application of SOLID engineering principles, agile practices, and skill set development.

Redwood City, Us

I designed, implemented, and/or enhanced a number of critical infrastructure and back-end systems that helped launch Rift in 2011. These include a crash handling service, a monitoring service to detect and restart crashed server processes, a game event logging infrastructure and log search tool. In addition, I contributed to scalability testing, and the development of server administration and customer service tools.After the initial launch of Rift, I supported our expansion internationally by architecting a framework that enabled Rift to integrate with the authentication and billing systems of our international partners in Russia, Korea, Taiwan, and China. The key challenge here was to present a single consistent API to the Rift code while abstracting away the highly divergent implementation details of each partner's product.

Bellevue, Wa, Us

I demoted myself from Lead Programmer to this position, because I wanted to get back to hands-on problem solving for a while. As part of this, I got to choose and train my successor. This was a great experience. It allowed me to view my performance and decisions as a Lead from a different (and enlightening) perspective.Spearheaded improvements to our development process and tools, our content pipeline, and deployment process. Also led client and server optimization efforts, content tool feature development, game data reporting, and server database consolidation. Analyzed game metrics and log data to troubleshoot critical support issues and initiate improvements to the live service.Leveraged my knowledge of the game and infrastructure to assist team members by consulting on technical design, debugging, and work flow improvements.

Bellevue, Wa, Us

Built and led team of 15 programmers through product launch and live operations. Provided technical design guidance and oversight for major systems. Supported project planning by identifying task scope, dependencies and risks.Defined architecture objectives for client and server performance, server scalability, data integrity, metrics, and server configuration. Worked with design and art leads to ensure game features and architecture were compatible.Designed a concurrent development process to insulate content creators from changes. Established a process for performing regular client and server updates with support for emergency hot fixes. This paved the way to launch by improving product stability and establishing a predictable release cycle.

Bellevue, Wa, Us

Architected the core game scripting system and related tools. Implemented a suite of interactive objects for scripting game play scenarios.Implemented game features including client and server collision detection, movement control, combat, game object simulation, and server metrics.Instituted continuous integration for the project by creating an automated build and unit testing system.

Implemented item and inventory game systems in Python and C++ for the Ultima Online 2 MMO project (cancelled).

New York City, Ny, Us

Implemented a UNIX framework in C++ for enabling web products to access the LEXIS-NEXIS online databases. Led development of vertical market web search products implemented on Windows NT using Microsoft web technologies.

Atlanta, Georgia, Us

Ba, Finance, Real Estate, English

Computer Science