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Eric's Work History

Senior Software Engineer

2/2010 to Present - Blizzard Entertainment - Irvine, California

  • Tripled the capacity of the Hearthstone game server through software performance analysis and judicious code modification
  • Reduced Oracle database resource usage by 30 percent in two regions through analysis of data access patterns and coordination of system tuning with DBAs
  • Designed and implemented a player-data migration and transformation service to bring terabytes of player data into a consistent state across all production regions
  • Implemented the server-side components of Set Rotation and other player-facing features
  • Added new features to the Hearthstone gameplay engine

Lead Software Engineer

10/2010 to 2/2015- Carbine Studios - Aliso Viejo, California

Gameplay and Content Systems team 10/2014 to present

  • Lead a team responsible for AI, gameplay systems, and external integrations

Server (network, database) team 10/2011 to 10/2014

  • Managed online game servers
  • Investigated and resolved technical and customer support issues
  • Coordinated implementation of 2-step verification and other login security measures
  • Coordinated with NCSOFT platform teams in Austin, TX and Seoul, KR to integrate game servers with account management, store, and NCSOFT customer support
  • Redesigned and rewrote the server database layer, employing code generation and write-through cache automation
  • Improved network layer throughput by redesigning and rewriting data serialization and buffer management
  • Added data encryption to client/server communicationIntegrated game servers with NCSOFT platform authentication services
  • Designed and implemented a server-health monitoring system through real-time collection and reporting of OS, physical server, and process data
  • Enhanced and maintained the game-specific customer support tools
  • Mentored and trained new team members

Tools team 10/2010 to 10/2011

  • Enhanced and extended the world editor, asset browser, and a variety of other tools
  • Designed and built an editor for creating and managing set dressings for dungeons, and for adding internal and external décor to structures (prop composition)
  • Built an internal game-data searching and inspection website ("Wowhead" for WildStar) 
  • Rebuilt internal and alpha/beta game account management websites

Business Unit Architect

6/2008 to 2/2010 - McAfee, Inc - Mission Viejo, California

  • Led a research team developing next-generation technologies.
  • Coordinated teams across business units in development of common components for network-based vulnerability assessment and web application assessment.
  • Architected and led modifications to McAfee Vulnerability Manager to import, execute, and report Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) content. Represented McAfee at SCAP conferences and standards meetings.
  • Designed and managed product changes to enable Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2, SCAP, and Common Criteria certification.
  • Presented and participated in panel discussions at McAfee Focus '08.
  • Participated in Global and Business Unit architect forums.
  • Organized and led a company-wide special interest group of architects and key individuals to promote product integration technologies and strategies.
  • Mentored engineers and junior architects for career development.
  • Organized in-house training for key engineers to widen technical expertise.
  • Introduced creation of video-based product training as an end-stage of the development process. The training videos support the Quality Assurance, Technical Support, and Sustaining teams. The first run of this process produced over 15 hours of training videos for use by the above teams as well as System Engineers and engineering teams in India.

Product Architect

6/2005 to 6/2008 - McAfee, Inc. - Mission Viejo, California

  • Coordinated with Enterprise-level customers, Quality Assurance, Technical Support, Product Management, Program Management, and other product teams.
  • Provided technology training for McAfee development teams.
  • Participated in company-wide architecture planning for next-generation products.
  • Responsible for product architectural direction, adoption of new technologies, legal product questionnaires for export control, and third-party licensing approvals.
  • Designed a new system for product reporting based on ECMAScript, XSL, and a simple but flexible XML description language.
  • Designed a new system for product configuration, updates, patches, and component monitoring. Created initial architecture and design documents, wrote core code components, and guided the project to successful completion.
  • Performance analyzed the core scripting/assessment engine to discover timing bottlenecks and to guide future architectural modifications.
  • Designer, team lead, and project manager for creation of SNMP-based module for integration with third-party remediation systems.
  • Developed design documents and work estimates for new project proposals.
  • Created and evangelized software design and development philosophy for reducing the cost of change during development of complex Enterprise-level software.
  • Wrote knowledge-base articles for Technical Support. Ran internal training sessions for various product components for Quality Assurance and Technical Support.

Senior Software Engineer

10/2002 to 6/2005 - McAfee/Foundstone, Inc. - Mission Viejo, California

  • Initiated and led the implementation of authentication and digital signatures for product update downloads using a commercial signing certificate.
  • Designed OpenSSL-based PKI solution for (i) configuration of SSL communication and (ii) creation, management, and distribution of SSL certificates for SQL Server, IIS, and OpenSSL-based modules.
  • Performed performance analysis of report generation, reducing generation time 300X.
  • Performed forensic analysis and recovery of the code base for the Web Application Assessment module. Improved the performance of the module by a factor of 2. Reduced the code base from 68K lines in 420 files to 21K lines in 170 files.
  • Reverse-engineered a custom-404 page recognition algorithm and wrote a patent disclosure.
  • Designed and coordinated report Internationalization (I18N), and implementation of language-pack creation and distribution process for localized content.

Senior Staff Engineer

10/2000 to 5/2002 - Y-Media Corporation - Irvine, California

  • Designed algorithms for ASIC, SW, and DSP implementation. [CFA-to-RGB interpolation; image enhancement; color correction; exposure and gain control; white balance]
  • Evaluated methods for implementing transcendental and nonlinear functions in ASIC.
  • Evaluated designs for a floating-point analog-to-digital converter.
  • Adapted the Y-Media imager to a TI DSC21 digital still camera system-on-chip.
  • Evaluated and selected color-correction/IR filters.
  • Developed TCP/IP-enabled camera systems. Created custom Linux distributions.

Cofounder

8/1999 to 10/2000 - nD Space, LLC - Irvine, California

  • Defined requirements, architecture specification, and project plan.
  • Designed a multithreaded scripting language specialized for game AI.
  • Researched and evaluated middleware software packages for use on the project (Miles, Granny, Bink, and various 3D engines).
  • Designed and implemented proprietary graphics and geometry processing algorithms.

 

Senior Research Fellow

8/1996 to 8/1999 - UC Irvine - Irvine, California

 

Research Fellow

8/1993 to 8/1996 - McGill University - Montreal, PQ, Canada