Game engineer with 7+ years in the industry, 6 of them at one studio: mobile and PC titles in C# and Unity plus the .NET services behind them. Hired for three things — moving legacy engines forward without stopping the product, turning prototypes into architecture that holds tests, and putting AI agents to real work in a delivery pipeline.
Legacy engine migration: Moved a live Unity client from 2017 to Unity 6.3 across six LTS steps without pausing the product. Each step closed by a tagged checkpoint and verified by compile, a 5v5 match, a standalone build and asset bundles.
Prototype to production architecture: Restructured a 343-file game mode into layered assemblies: tests 98 → 289 EditMode plus 14 PlayMode end-to-end, ScriptableObject configs 29 → 0 (JSON-driven), mutable statics 9 → 0 (DI registry), the largest system 1665 → 780 LOC. Chose in-place refactoring after a full rewrite attempt proved slower.
Game meta backend from scratch: Built the meta service on MagicOnion StreamingHub, MongoDB and .NET Aspire: JWT access and refresh with only token hashes stored, Steam as an auth provider, role-based access, heartbeat with automatic reconnect, and packet-loss measurement under load.
Production incident diagnosis: Traced a live DDoS to its amplification root in the RUDP layer through 46 client sessions and 2 crash dumps. Removed an O(n) scan per unknown packet and per-packet logging behind a failover flag, covered by 5 regression tests.
Feature delivery and platforms: Cut memory use 30% and CPU 20% with allocation-free patterns. Shipped 15+ features including a battle pass, integrating Firebase, AppsFlyer, Pushwoosh, Unity IAP and Xsolla.
Mentoring: Took a mid-level programmer through probation, and moved the team to allocation-free code with a documented asset workflow they still follow.
NivalSaint-Petersburg, Russia
Junior Game Designer · Jan 2019 – Jul 2020
Content systems: Delivered 10+ tower types with distinct mechanics to release in a tower-defense title, and wrote the technical specifications artists and programmers built from.
Open source and community: Released 2 company projects as open source, then organised a team of enthusiasts and launched 2 community-run game servers.
Selected Projects
AI work platform: Replaced spreadsheet-based task tracking with a local platform — ASP.NET Core (.NET 10), Blazor WASM PWA, MongoDB, an own MCP server exposing 13 tools, and n8n orchestration with a custom node for agent steps. MVP in a single session at 41/41 unit tests, verified by a task running the full pipeline end to end.
RAG assistant for university applicants: From nothing to a deployed service in 10 days — a 700-chunk corpus over two domains, Chroma with fastembed, and an LLM relevance judge that replaced a brittle 0.52 similarity threshold; deployed under systemd after Docker hit OOM on a 961 MB host.
Conversation-practice Telegram bot: Runs in production with analytics built from scratch — 0 → 374 events over 35 days from 12 users, 88% dialogue completion, 295 passing tests.
Prime World open source: Top contributor of the public release, 19 of its 25 commits — audited licences and purged proprietary vendor SDKs from the entire git history, not just the current tree: github.com/nival/Prime-World.
