Experience
Education
- B.S. in Computer Science from University of Southern Maine
- x5 Deans List
Software Engineer Intern (VR Visualization) @ Kelson Marine Co.
(via Innovate for Maine Fellowship)
Portland, Maine
May 2026 – August 2026
- Reverse-engineered an FFT-based ocean rendering package, made ocean-engineer-advised modifications, and implemented its wave model as a new simulation mode inside an existing C++ simulation framework.
- Tested with Catch2 and profiled with Google Benchmark.
- Helped improve their rendering of simulation data inside Unity, optimizing with HLSL (standard surface and compute), GPU instancing, and Burst jobs.
- Improved Unity framerate in-editor by ~60% for loadcases using the new wave mode.
UEFN Programmer & Technical Artist Contractor
May 2023 – Present
- Contract work in Fortnite’s UGC ecosystem for a handful of the Top 15 creators.
- Programming responsive user interface’s or intricate gameplay systems with Verse and SceneGraph.
- Leveraging Unreal Engine tools such as Material Graph, Motion Graphics, Niagara, and more.
- Automating tedious tasks with Python scripts and other self-programmed external tools.
- Creating assets with Blender, Adobe, MaterialMaker, etc.
Functional QA Tester @ Activision Central Tech (Temporary)
Portland, Maine
June 2022 – August 2022
- Collaborated with programmers working on the Call of Duty engine and editor.
- Tested and documented engine hot reload feature strengths and weaknesses for tools programmers.
- Wrote Python scripts to automate workflow.
- Debugged in C++ with Visual Studio and exercised the engine through the level editor.
- Used Perforce/P4V for version control.
- Filed defects and test reports in JIRA.
Student Researcher @ Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval (AIIR) Lab
Portland, Maine
Feburary 2026 – May 2026
- Researched and implemented information retrieval and NLP methods in legal and scientific domains.
- COLIEE-26: built a pipeline that decides whether one Canadian legal case entails another without access to ground truth. Lab placed second in one task. Co-authored the paper.
- SimpleText: classified scientific papers against a taxonomy by prompting a small open-weight LLM, then embedding each answer and walking down the taxonomy tree by similarity. Co-authored the paper.
- Self-directed effort to host a local llama.cpp inference server, consolidating scattered per-user model downloads behind one endpoint and offloading to system RAM to fit larger model.
Independent Developer
March 2019 – June 2022
- Shipping inside Fortnite’s UGC ecosystem while growing my YouTube presence.
- 250 million plays from 20 million unique player accounts
- Highlights:
- Vortex Zone Wars
- Set on the side of a volcano, a competitive PVP gamemode with a fast moving storm to push players closer together. Players are given randomized items to use to their advantage and be the last one standing.
- Featured and contracted by Epic Games to be on the front page of Fortnite in the first Zone Wars Limited Time Mode (LTM) with three other creators.
- Respawn Zone Wars
- PVP gamemode where players would follow a cyclical storm and fight until a player gets 30 eliminations. First zone wars of its kind.
- 2X Zone Wars
- A compact gamemode made to simulate the most intense moments of a Fortnite Battle Royale match with a tournament-style scoring system.
- Featured by Epic Games as a Matchmaking Portal.
- Featured by Epic Games for Creator Showcase 2X (pun unintended but apprecieated).
- Vortex Zone Wars
- One of the few founders of Zone Wars genre
YouTube Creator
March 2019 – April 2020
- Gained 15 thousand subscribers and 2 million views over the course of a year.
- Primarily educational/tutorial based Fortnite UGC content, but also did showcase of own creations.