Ken Railey

Highly motivated, creative software engineer with a proven record of delivering scalable, high-performance applications and games on time and within budget. A demonstrated talent for designing and building robust, efficient, and maintainable production systems. Strong leadership skills, with substantial experience working remotely in a distributed environment.

C++, Objective C, Ruby and Rails, Actionscript 3, Java, Scala, Perl, OpenGL, Linux, MySQL, Web Services

February 2014 - Current
Lead Software Engineer - Core Technology, High 5 Games

• Designed and implemented mobile game platform in C++, Objective C, and Java. Eight mobile games including Vegas Slots and Electri5 Casino have been deployed to both Android and iOS using this technology so far.
• Shipped High 5 Casino and Shake the Sky Video Poker games for Android, iOS and Facebook browser platforms

January 2013 - February 2014
Contract Software Engineer

• Designed and implemented multiplayer game server in Scala for Ensemble Online MMORPG
• Optimization of existing game client
• Lead development of new game features

June 2012 - January 2013
Contract Software Engineer

• Consultant and Developer for TV Dinner second screen television game.
• Implemented browser based version of iPad game client.
• Optimized Ruby on Rails backend web services to eliminate severe scaling issues they were experiencing.

January 2011 - June 2012
Lead Software Engineer, Electrotank

• Developer on Fruit Smash head-to-head multiplayer facebook puzzle game.
• Lead Developer on Ubisoft's Imagine Town, a large scale Flash MMO targeted at pre-teens.
• Lead developer during final phase of production and launch of Rinksters hockey themed virtual world for kids.

February 2007 - December 2010
Lead Software Engineer, Electric Sheep Company

• Lead developer on Lifetime Television's Fashion Improv Facebook social game.
• Lead developer of the StreamJam Facebook social game and live music experience.
• Designed and implemented the Webflock 3D social gaming client platform in as3. Custom game client is able to customize, animate, and render 2D or high-poly 3D avatars in Actionscript. This platform was used to implement the Ridemakerz kid's MMO, Showtime's L Word Virtual Chat application, and others.
• Designed and implemented a multiplayer game server in Java and Scala supporting more than twelve thousand simultaneous players per host. Developed an optimized binary network protocol in Java and as3 to reduce bandwidth requirements up to 300% from our initial third party solution. Implemented web based administration interface in JRuby/Rails, running on embedded Jetty. Plugin architecture allows runtime configuration and loading of game specific behaviors.
• Optimized and debugged games developed by third party vendors in Actionscript 3, in one case cutting the memory footprint of a racing game by 75% and tripling the average frame rate.
• Implemented the OnRez Second Life viewer with integrated CSI:NY game. Built with one other developer, from a licensed version of the official client using C++ and OpenGL. Project was deployed to coincide with the episode "Down the Rabbit Hole". Customized viewer featured a completely revised user interface, load balancing, and web browser to access additional web based game content.
• Responsible for XML based user interfaces for MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach, Virtual Hills, and Virtual Pimp My Ride worlds. Built and maintained user interfaces interfaces for shopping, polls, and event/game scheduling.

March 2005 - February 2007
Software Development Engineer, Amazon.com

• Technical project manager for Amazon Unbox Video (now Amazon Video On Demand) third party systems integration. Implemented metadata publishing system to export catalog item data to partner systems. Coordinated with third-party developers throughout implementation, integration, and testing.
• Designed and built a distributed Unbox Video client notification service in Java that handles requests effectively at up to 30,000 transactions per second. This system can quickly and easily scale horizontally to handle future growth. Amazon.com was granted a patent on the technologies developed for this system.
• Implemented an interface to publish video metadata to the Amazon catalog using Java and XSLT to reduce the delay of new item creation for reliable ingestion of next day television video content.
• Designed and implemented web based tools to support the Amazon Unbox customer service team in Perl and Mason.
• Built a comprehensive set of service testing and instrumentation tools using Perl. These tools were used to monitor performance, perform ad hoc testing, and aggregate performance metrics for back end web services.
• Maintained "Search Inside the Book" content ingestion pipeline. Tracked system metrics and implemented bug fixes for large legacy Perl codebase.

B.S. Computer Science/Computer Information Systems, University of West Florida, 2001, Pensacola, FL

A.A. General, Pensacola Junior College, 1997, Pensacola, FL