Comprehensive Résumé

Tim Mendez – Senior Backend Engineer
San Jose, California
Want to drop me a line? Send me a message on LinkedIn.

Fiercely player-driven.

Skills (sorted by proficiency)

Languages
Kotlin, JavaScript/Typescript/CoffeeScript, Go, Unity C#, JSX/HTML, Stylus/Sass/CSS, .Net Core C#, SQL, Java

Infrastructure/DevOps
AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, Cloudfront, Route53, Amplify, DynamoDB), Multiplay/Clanforge, TeamCity, Caddy, Pulumi, Datadog, Docker, PM2, CircleCI, Cloudflare, Azure (Cosmos), Heroku

Miscellaneous
Pragma.gg, Node.js, Ktor, HTTP/WS/gRPC, React, Vue, Git, PostgreSQL, MySQL, BoltJS (Slackbots), Discord.js, React Native/Expo, Firebase, Stripe, Angular, MariaDB, Salesforce

Experience

Wonderstorm San Jose, CA – Principal Software Engineer
April 2023 - Present 🪃

  • Implemented loadouts system, timetravel cheats, requirements tracking, daily quests, push notifications to active players, on-the-fly configurable code profiling in logs, mission rotation.
  • Built 3 in 1 automatic benchmarking, loadtesting, integration testing client with Slack reporting
  • Wrote infrastructure in Pulumi to launch gateway, platform, and RDS environments in EC2.
  • Established liveops reporting: Datadog metric threshold alerts, EC2 threshold alerts, Pagerduty and Slack integration and notifications. Thankfully I haven’t had to wake up in the middle of the night yet, but I’m oncall 24/7 to ensure that our dedicated players can play the game!
  • Cut our monthly CDN bill by ~$25k by switching to Cloudflare lol.
  • Wrote a telemetry visualization tool & pipeline in Go to pull down jsonl events in S3 and structurally load them into a local dockerized Postgres database. Used go-echarts to visualize data in neat graphs. This data visualization helped identify bugs in loot tables, parts of missions that were too difficult, outliers in hero comp performance. All this information was used by design to help players have a more balanced and enjoyable experience. No more grinding lengthy missions for shards!
  • Led the patching process for the game’s platform and content before and after it was live. We’ve managed to patch with very minimal downtime for players.
  • Interacted with our wonderful playerbase on Discord to help identify bugs and support them in any way I can.
  • Identified and fielded our 2 major outages (login queue “DDOS”, Android download bug) quickly.
  • Optimized Kotlin platform using VisualVM to identify and attack poorly-performing code e.g. reduced login time from 1.2s → 56ms.
  • Wrote lightweight log-tailing agent in Go to ship error logs to Slack.
  • Shipped the game https://www.playxadia.com/

Amazon Games Sunnyvale, CA – SDE II
September 2022 - March 2023
Hired on as fully-remote, but unexpected mandated RTO forced my hand to leave earlier than I’d have liked

  • Fullstack web development for Amazon Games detail pages.
  • Implemented log tailing service for our pages.
  • Helped build out components and pages for web client detail page and purchase path for digital video games and in-game content.
  • Wrote technical design docs for a few features including Epic account linking, payment setup, and automatic redirects between them.
  • Fielded on-call rotation tickets for customer-facing issues.

Wonderstorm Irvine, CA – Senior → Principal Software Engineer
January 2021 - September 2022
Wonderstorm had plans to RTO, and I had to move to the bay

  • Helped bring The Dragon Prince game to life. Developed using Kotlin and C++, strongly focused on leading platform development via Pragma.gg with a sprinkle of client integration and a scoop of devops
  • Implemented battlepass, weekly quests, upgradable items, gem system, mission progression, hero progression, cross-platform/device persistent player settings, content validation
  • Set up metrics collection and dashboards on Datadog
  • Configured CI/CD builds and deploys
  • Wrote GimmieLogs®
    • Automatically creates patch notes during deployment and posts them to Slack, keeping track of which environment has what code
    • Standalone tool compiles logs from client, gameserver, and platform all on your local machine in a directory
    • Slackbot command for grabbing gameserver/platform logs given an environment and game ID

Chipotle Mexican Grill Newport Beach, CA – Software Engineer
September 2019 - January 2021

  • Created e-burritos in the form of online ordering. Vue/TypeScript on the frontend, .NET Core on the backend, Azure in devops land
  • Features: Fullstack round up to donate, menu refactors to allow for tractor beverages and cauliflower rice, experience ratings, Foodprint, and general modal-driven development
  • Supported other teams for the Canada site launch
  • Helped bring feature parity across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iOS, and Android
  • Assisted with production deployments

Originate Newport Beach, CA – Software Engineer
April 2016 - September 2019

  • Frontend Unity development (C#) on Daydream VR music visualizer app with Spotify integration for an internal project.
  • Fullstack web development (ES6 Node.js – React) on commercial real estate webapp for agents with Salesforce and Google Slides integration for Matthews Real Estate Investment Services.
  • Fullstack web development (ES6 Node.js – React/Wordpress) on consultancy webapp designed to capture more business for McKinsey.
  • Backend web development (Go) on a trucking management platform, specializing in Stripe integration for Zed, a subsidiary of Cummins.
  • Backend web development (ES6 Node.js) for a keyboard app for Billie.
  • Frontend Unity development (C#) integrated a platform into a demo project with a menu system for Versus Systems.
  • Frontend web development (CoffeeScript/Stylus React) for a computational resource utility webapp.
  • Fullstack web development (CoffeeScript Node.js – TypeScript/Jade/Stylus Angular 1) on a commercial real estate webapp for CommercialSearch.

Originate Irvine, CA – Software Intern
June 2015 - August 2015

  • Frontend web development (CoffeeScript, Gherkin/Cucumber, Stylus, in-house software built on top of React)
  • Participated in an intern project - wrote a karaoke web app in a small group. Personally did fullstack development (JavaScript, HTML/Sass, Node/Express, Heroku, Postgres).

Education

Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo – BS Computer Science
September 2011 - March 2016

Side Projects

Auction House GX
January - February 2024 – Hiatus due to crunch
gRPC server for a game based entirely around the Auction House experience. Types shared across a Go client/server with Protobuf. Postgres database. Binary data sent between client/server. JSON game content loaded with reflection. An exercise to see how quick an ultra-optimized game backend can be when that is the sole focus. Before it went on ice, it handled 112k (rudimentary) logins per second with inventory creation, item creation, database writing, and client response on a Ryzen 5 5600x.

Go Redfin Archiver
January 2024 – Hiatus due to crunch
Scrapes Redfin to mass-download a listing’s photos because I don’t want to right-click-download on every image.

MissingNo Cards
November 2021
Generated Pokémon cards using machine learning and showcased them on a site. Trained in Google Colab with stylegan2, website is React, AWS Amplify, S3, Cloudflare.

ShopBySub
September 2020 - October 2021
Website that aggregates Amazon links in Reddit comments by subreddit. Using Node.js, snoowrap, pushshift.io, PostgreSQL, React, AWS Amplify, S3, Cloudflare.
Tragically destroyed by Reddit’s API cost changes.

Devoted 30 - Android - iOS
January 2020 - February 2020
A mobile fitness timer app to go along with a proprietary workout routine. Written using React Native (JavaScript) and Expo. Managed store pages and releases. No longer available due to required SDK updates.

LoMatch
April 2018 - July 2018
Developed an open-source tool to, when given an input object and an output object, generate LoDash functions and predicates the user can use to transform the input object to the output object.
Tool written in JavaScript.
Online tool Heroku/Cloudflare.

PUBGderboards
April 2018 - September 2019
Developed a website to allow players of the game Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds to view their stats in dynamic leaderboards against their friends. Did fullstack development in a team of 2 using React/JavaScript, CoffeeScript/Node.js/DynamoDB, AWS EC2/Cloudflare, Raspberry Pi.

Crypto Tweeter
November 2017 - March 2018
Wrote guides on how to purchase various cryptocurrencies with USD on Medium over a few months. Then integrated with Twitter and wrote a CoffeeScript script (with Node.js) to dynamically add hashtags and tweet out links to my cryptocurrency guides on a schedule.

Silly Slots
May 2017 - August 2017
A simple slot machine app with three reels and five lines. Features timed token releases, rewarded video ads, in-app purchases, and a leaderboard.
Written in C# with Unity 5.5. Integrated with Google game services, Unity Ads, and Unity IAP.
Released on Google Play and Amazon Appstore. No longer available due to required SDK updates.

Survival
February 2016 - March 2016
A 3D first-person shooter horror game for Mac/Windows/Linux. The player walks around in a dark building with a flickering flashlight and a pistol. Waves of spiders spawn along with a boss. The player must pick up randomly-spawned ammunition and kill spiders to survive.
Written in C# with Unity 5.3, map made in Blender. Worked in a team of four where my responsibilities included player controls, gun mechanics, ammo interaction, particle effects, and environment.

Boulderdash
February 2016 - March 2016
An iOS gamified bouldering app. Users input in specifics about their climbs in order to earn experience points and level up. Connecting with Facebook allows users to see their friends’ progress and specific climbs they share in a newsfeed.
Written in Swift 3 and JavaScript (Node.js). Worked in a team of two doing fullstack development and devops (AWS EC2, dploy).

Swingy Spider
September 2015 - December 2015
A mobile endless runner style game where you tap to shoot a web to randomly generated leaves in order to swing to the next. Features a parallax background, leaderboards, achievements, and interstitial ads.
Written in C# with Unity 5.1. Integrated with Google game services and Google AdMob. Released on Google Play and Amazon Appstore. No longer available due to required SDK updates.

The Struggle of the Rubiniumite Wars
January 2015 - June 2015
A 3D browser-based strategy game set amongst the stars – build a fleet of ships and face off against AI or human opponents in simultaneous turn-based combat.
Written in JavaScript (Node.js, THREE.js) in a team of four. Responsible for database interaction with Parse, game engine, and devops (AWS EC2, dploy).