Tom Hill Email & Phone Number

Austin, Texas, Us

Bringing video games to Tesla vehicles to help make them the most fun possible.Helping develop experiences for the Tesla Infotainment system.Developing Theater & in vehicle Web experiences.

Austin, Texas, Us

Helped bring Beach Buggy Racing 2 & Cuphead to the Tesla Infotainment system.Improve Tools & workflow for the team developing the UI for the Tesla Infotainment system.

Redmond, Wa, Us

Senior Engineering Manager for the team of 25+ Engineers responsible for building and maintaining Tools to enable, optimize and support 343 Industries' internal game development in the Slipspace Engine for Halo Infinite.

Redmond, Wa, Us

Senior Engineer Lead for the Infrastructure team, 343 Industries' internal game development; Enabling & Supporting 10+ Content Updates for Halo 5: Guardians on Xbox One, release of Halo 5: Forge & Halo 5 Local Server PC applications.

Redmond, Wa, Us

Lead of Halo 5: Guardians Infrastructure team, with responsibility for areas including build creation & deployment powered by bespoke build farm software, crash reporting systems, audio pipeline, developer environment tools among others. During development of Halo 5: Guardians staffed the team from one up to five engineers, managing and directing their work. Ported Xbox 360 centric build systems to produce multiple platform SKUs (Xbox One, PC, Thunderhead). Dealt with scalability issues around the huge increases in content footprint (DVD -> Blu Ray sized games) multiplied up by serving a studio of 400+ developers and growing the number of machines in build farm from ~250 to 1000+ machines. Analysis and forecast of hardware requirements leading into project’s budget calculations. Oversaw in place upgrades of build deployment, crash processing and build creation systems. Continually drove fixes for inefficiencies found; leading to improved reliability and stability. Modified existing technology to be data driven, exposing many parts of the software to allow game team members to self-serve build production behavioural changes. Process changes to recognise that the infrastructure team runs an internal service, making them more rehearsed and process driven when incidents break out; creation of ‘run books’ for pieces of technology in use throughout the studio to aid maintenance and helping to promote self-service for users across the studio, regular review meetings of incidents to take prompt action to improve stability, course correct issues, set priorities and knowledge share within the team.

Redmond, Wa, Us

Member of the 343 Infrastructure Team, directly responsible for developer's environment setting tool and development build installation process for Halo 4 while also helped develop the studio’s bespoke build farm software. Spent much time making the development build installation process reliable as the studio scaled up to a ~300 person team. Converted commonly used tool database queries into web service queries to help scalability. Hooked up a programmatically controlled 'Build Broken' light to communicate build status to the team. Linked the code review tool with the build farm, so that it could review developer's code automatically allowing developers a seamless way to get their code built & tested.In preproduction of Halo 5: Guardians; technology to improve large file content delivery to the development team, made sure the branch switching process was as easy for the team as possible, created a support reporting tool that grabs as much pertinent detail of the user and their machine to help receivers of the support request triage and speed up diagnosis time.

Twycross, Warwickshire, Gb

Member of the Utilities group for Kinect Sports: Season Two. Software point of contact for making sure builds of the game were delivered in a timely manner. Iterated on existing in house build systems to support ever increasing number of team member and physical site locations for development of the project. Worked remotely and on site temporarily at Big Park in Vancouver, Canada to help with their use of Rare’s toolset for their development on the project. Continued to iterate and optimise the build process for ‘releasable’ builds, so that it was much simpler for the final build, also applied these improvements to the Kiosk & Demo build delivery process.

Twycross, Warwickshire, Gb

Member of the development team for Kinect Sports, a Kinect launch title; responsible for scheduling work for the area of Systems and Servers. This feature area for the game included composing builds to give outside parties (internal test, executives, external partners etc.), liaising with Microsoft’s in-house Games Test Organisation in America, integrating Massive Advertising in-game, the ‘Show off and Share’ video uploading capability and the game’s retail stats collection SQL database. A sizable part my direct development role was making sure both the toolset and process scaled to a rapidly increasing team size (90+ developers), whilst being able to produce regular (minimum of bi-weekly ranging to daily) ‘demo standard’ builds of the game. I was also responsible for putting together the game’s Day 1 Title Update. Development wise whilst not acting in an organiser role, I focused on many automated scripts, visualisation tools & process improvements to make these builds much easier to perform.

Twycross, Warwickshire, Gb

Unreleased project that relied on a high number of users to be connected to one another over a network. Created a bespoke tool solution that enabled the easy usage of the accompanying 50+ ‘devkit farm’ help the testing effort by both developers and automated overnight tests alike. The project would also have been highly focused on Premium Downloadable Content - created implementation plan for how it would have supported it just before project was cancelled.

Twycross, Warwickshire, Gb

The (3 man) Build Lab team was tasked with bringing the 5+ game teams’ development practices at Rare together so that the company could benefit from a standardised development practice. This meant ~12 months of harvesting (into C#) and generalising (making the tools data driven) the current tools used by teams; then improving them to be better than the previous suite. The user count has now reached 130+; the majority of the development staff at Rare (over all development disciplines) with some users located not just in different offices, but countries and time zones. The final set of tools meant that development teams got Build PC software and Development environments ‘in a box’.Some areas of interest in this role include;•Development process improvement. Looked at current ways of working at Rare with all developer disciplines, and made tools to streamline and support them to make workflow more effective.•Main priority was to allow developers to work on or switch projects far easier.•Machine setup – how to get a machine setup correctly for development, i.e. the correct versions of applications are installed, source files in the right places, Environment Variables set up, etc.•SQL server – all log messages from the tools were stored in a SQL database. A custom labelling system was implemented; which was tied into the automated build PC’s BVT systems, so that developers could get as much information as possible allowing them to choose to the best possible ‘last known good’.•User Support – Development of the tools was on-site, which gave much opportunity for user support. Developed several tools to collate errors / allow users to ask for help to make this service as streamlined as possible.•Tools helped ship Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for Xbox 360.•Other notes: Have given a University talk at Leicester University, and five minute section inside a talk at the gamesEdu conference. Involved in the recruitment process, when the company was hiring.

Twycross, Warwickshire, Gb

Nine Months spent within the Research & Development team which began with bug fixing and feature addition to the company’s internal SDK. Focus changed to work for another team’s in-game editor, which required liaison with both programmers and artists located in another office on site. My time in R&D culminated in a three month conversion of an in-house unannounced Xbox game project to the Xbox 360 platform. Four Months spent with the Perfect Dark Zero team, which involved the creation of an automated testing system. This involved setting up a series of automated testing procedures to be run before Engineer commits, while also collating the manual update/build/submit processes of the game to become an automated process to run on a standalone build machine.