From Shipping Games to Running Technology

The pattern

On paper this looks like a scattered career: game developer, founder, PhD researcher, ML engineer, Head of Technology. It's actually one thread, followed wherever it led.

Roots: games, and a first taste of founding

I started at Climax, then went indie — founding Unruly Attractions and shipping Standpoint (a first-person puzzle game, PC/Mac/Linux/Xbox One), owning the engineering end-to-end while leading an international team of artists, designers and musicians. I later joined Gaming Corps as Lead Developer, shipping The Descendant, where I realised I actually enjoyed the people-management side as much as the technical.

Games are, in my opinion, the purest form of UX: every interaction has to be immediately legible or the whole thing falls apart. That instinct for what makes software actually work for people has stuck with me ever since.

Generalist years: engineering practice, different contexts

From there I spent time as a software engineer at Tramonex, Secret Escapes and Post Quantum — picking up engineering practice across genuinely different business contexts, and enjoying that variety as much as the code itself.

The PhD: taking the time to go deep

That curiosity is what took me into a PhD at Queen Mary University of London — genuinely interested in both software testing and machine learning, and willing to take the time to sit with a hard problem rather than ship around it. My research (published at IEEE CoG 2021 and AISB 2021) looked at finding and explaining failure modes in learned agent behaviour: novel ways of probing where machine-learning systems break, and why.

Team Genji / SAS: taking it into production

I joined Team Genji during my university placement and stayed on afterwards; we were later acquired by SAS Institute and became their games analytics arm, working with clients including Epic Games. That's where the research turned into production engineering — the same instinct for where systems break, now applied at enterprise scale.

Wildkind: full ownership, work I actually care about

Head of Technology at Wildkind was a real step up in responsibility — and for an event I already loved, which matters: I get to see the direct impact of what I build, not just ship it and move on.

Outcome

• Shipped commercial games solo, published peer-reviewed ML research, engineered production analytics for enterprise clients, and now run technology for a whole business.
• Comfortable at any layer: hands-on code, deep research, people leadership, or company-level technology strategy.