About

I am an engineer who moved into running teams, and I kept writing code the whole way.

After my CS degree at Texas A&M I spent a few years in large-scale software. At Microsoft I worked on Windows graphics and services, debugging at the kernel level across GDI and DirectX and backporting fixes to earlier Windows versions. At Amazon I was on Twitch Prime, where I built the Gifting feature in Twitch chat, owning the React front end and the backend integration, and led the migration of Twitch Prime’s login onto Prime Video with Amazon’s London team. Those years set the bar for engineering rigor that I still hold teams to.

In 2020 I co-founded Gerdoo Games and spent five years as its product lead. Republic of Jungle is a social deduction party game played on one shared screen with phones as controllers, which makes it a distributed system in disguise: a Unity client on the TV, a React controller in every phone’s browser, RabbitMQ in the middle, and services on AWS. I helped architect that stack, built the Unity client, and defined the metrics and dashboards that drove every update after launch. I also ran the budget, the 10-person team, the publishers and platform partners, and release management across six storefronts. It reached roughly 200K players.

In early 2025 I joined Dead Mage in Vancouver as Production Lead. I ran delivery across the studio’s titles for about 25 developers in six disciplines, owned the QA process and build gates, hired and onboarded developers, and managed vendors and partner teams in Turkey and India. I also owned the studio’s AI-assisted development program, from evaluating the tools to writing the playbook and the code-review guide the team works from.

Before any of that I was a game designer in Tehran and then part of a small remote indie team, Team Snore, whose Windows Phone game In Between passed 400K downloads. That is where I learned that the last ten percent is where projects live or die.

Research

At Texas A&M I co-authored a VR and HCI paper on scene transitions and teleportation in virtual reality, published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. It has been cited around 245 times, which still surprises me.

Outside of work

I hosted and produced Tangent, a Persian-language podcast where I interviewed Iranian creative professionals, from game developers, artists, and entrepreneurs to chefs, musicians, writers, and fashion designers. I run Social Corner Sessions, a recurring live music series recorded in downtown Vancouver and posted to YouTube.

The lanes I work in

Technical program management, engineering management, and product management. The resume covers all three.