Andrew Aye is an accomplished low-level software engineer and decisive leader and manager. Andrew has been responsible for leading teams through greenfield software development. He has repeatedly turned projects around through direct coding contributions, building trust with the implementation teams, and successful people and project management.

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Andrew Aye has been working in the game industry since March 2001. His responsibilities were first focused on creating significant game engine features (for example, a modern simulation on the PS2), evolving to create and modify all aspects of a game engine (real-time interactive). Along the way, he became responsible for growing other engineers and organizations. He always took a collaborative stance with cross-functional partners. The highlight (to date) of his career was owning the responsibility for leading and managing two Call of Duty projects (Modern Warfare 3 and Ghosts). In 2017 he transitioned into a traditional tech company (Amazon) and helped to bootstrap the Amazon Pharmacy project. In his role on the leadership team of North America Consumables, he helped navigate the pandemic for the engineering teams (remote work). He collaborated on creative solutions for the excessive demand placed on the amazon.com site.

Andrew Aye worked for 17 years in the video game industry, starting immediately after graduating from University. He graduated with degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. In 2020 he completed a dual degree program and received Master of Business Administration degrees from Cornell University and Queens University. In the game industry, his first job was to help develop a video game engine to allow small games to be published on Real Arcade. Next, using his experience in Mechanical Engineering, he developed a robust and highly optimized physics simulation. Leveraging his knowledge as part of the core technology group, he created a new game engine focused on the tools and technologies explicitly needed for RPG developers. He spent a year with the incubation and pack-in launch title team for Kinect and, for the first time, had to fix issues within the Xbox operating system. The highlight of his time in the video game industry was taking charge of the engineering and project management for two Call of Duty projects. After a well-deserved break, he returned to Microsoft, working with the publishing and developer experience teams for the Xbox One X. He then took the opportunity to test if his skill sets were transferable by taking a job at Amazon to be the technical leader on the North America Consumables leadership team. He is currently working at Meta in the Instagram Advertising organization.

Title: Engineering Manager

Company: Meta

Industry: Instagram Advertising

Dates of Employment: 2022/04 - Current

Projects: Instagram Advertising Delivery and Supply continuous development.

Summary: Joined to support the team working on Instagram Delivery and Supply, with a focus to development platform based approaches.

Management Accomplishments:

• Too recent

Individual Accomplishments:

• No individual contributor contributions

Title: Senior Director of Engineering

Company: Attentive Mobile

Industry: Mobile (SMS) Advertising

Dates of Employment: 2021/05 - 2021/10

Projects:

Summary: Joined to support the company’s growth (2x per year) towards an IPO (in 2022).

Management Accomplishments:

• Restructured the engineering teams to provide growth opportunities, support scaling of the team’s product offerings, and allow for future headcount growth.
• Established regular planning and reporting cycles.
• Proposed changes to the company’s performance management and compensation practices to provide the incentives to drive the desired behaviours for the company culture.
• Corrected compensation defects based on gender and ethnicity.
• Established monthly operational reviews.
• Prioritized a culture of ownership to raise the bar on operational and engineering excellence accountability.
• Managed the merging of Tone (company acquisition) and partnered to turn it into a successful product offering for Attentive in three months.

Individual Accomplishments:

• No individual contributor contributions

Title: Principle Engineer

Company: Amazon (North America Consumables, Leadership Team)

Industry: E-Retail

Dates of Employment: 2017/11 - 2021/04

Projects: Amazon Pharmacy, Climate Pledge Friendly, SNAP Benefits, Price Per Unit, Prime Pantry Modernization, Private Brands Merchandising Improvments.

Summary: Developed technical strategy and engineering capabilities as part of the Amazon North America Consumables leadership team for an organization with more than 150 engineers.

Management Accomplishments:

• Provided software engineering design guidance and operational reviews.
• Responsible for driving an initial engineering design to enable the health service organization to access Amazon CDO services while maintaining required data handling, protection, and privacy requirements.
• Established new standards for technical interview practices to improve the team’s inclusive culture and the candidate experience for diverse individuals.
• Worked to increase Amazon’s use of external data sources, specifically to increase the ingestion and use of GDSN data streams, including pack-hierarchy.
• Established a working model to clean up catalogue data, demonstrated through the first successful standardization and quality improvement for price per unit.
• Lead the technical team through the adaption to remote work and changes to manage over-demand on the site.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Performed due diligence to determine acquisition risks and opportunities (e.g., Pillpack).
• Challenged the financial allocation method used to assign shipping costs, resulting in a change to that process.

Project Achievements:

• Collaborated on entitlements totalling over $500 million in improvements to free cash flow.
• Pilot program for SNAP EBT scaled to a national program due to pandemic and resulting requests made by state governments and USDA.

Title: Lead Software Engineer

Company: Microsoft (Microsoft Xbox Publsihing)

Industry: Video Games

Dates of Employment: 2014/09 - 2017/10

Games Published: Age of Empires: Castle Siege, State of Decay 2, Super Lucky’s Tale, Crackdown 3, Ori and the Blind Forest, Quantum Break, ReCore

Summary: Responsible for taking projects in danger of failure (a turn-around) and creating a technical program plan, determining project scope, identifying required resources, and assigning responsibilities to facilitate the completion of the title.

Management Accomplishments:

• Responsible for handling the turn-around of up to three projects concurrently representing 5+ global studios and additional contractors accumulating to more than 500 engineers.
• Coached existing internal and external team members (studio heads and their executive team) to improve a studio’s performance, predictability, and quality of deliverables.
• Directed a small team through the process of scaling the auto-HDR feature to a more significant number of titles to coincide with the launch of the Xbox One X.
• Managed the transition of Age of Empires: Castle Siege to the iPhone, including the work to scale the back-end services from 1000s of concurrent connections to 100,000s.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Refactored Unity v5.3 file access to meet the requirements of 30 FPS and reasonable load times for Recore.
• Improve the GPU performance of Recore (Unity) and State of Decay 2 (UE4) by more than 20ms (achieving 20-30FPS).
• Feature implementation and optimization of 4K HDR in UE4.
• Optimization of Unity v5.3 streaming and data initialization implementation to support 60FPS (previously an uneven 40-50FPS) for Ori and the Blind Forest.
• Improvement of Quantum Break input latency (time from human action to visual result) by 12ms.

Title: Head of Project and Engineering, and Principle Engineer

Company: Infinity Ward (Acitivision)

Industry: Video Games

Dates of Employment: 2011/01 - 2014/04

Games Published: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts

Summary: I was responsible for creating the project plan, timeline, and production processes and defining the features and scope of work across three primary studios and three other supporting groups. During the critical final stages of development, this included responsibility for change and risk management and determining manufacturing readiness.

Management Accomplishments:

• Managed a team of 75+ software engineers across three studio locations.
• Lead franchise through a change of hardware generation with 1.5-year constraint.
• Oversaw pioneering work in real-time subdivision surfaces (see OpenSubDiv).
• Collaborate with art leads to establish new requirements and processes for the new consoles while maintaining backward compatibility.
• Established project milestones, deliverables, and areas of responsibility for all disciplines.
• Directed production and made critical content scoping decisions and resourcing commitments.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Responsible for defining the feature set for a next-generation CoD engine (PS4, XB3)
• Reduced audio processing by 3.5ms compute (or ~1ms wall clock)
• Refactored the VFX system (code optimization and porting to the SPU for the PS3) to achieve a 2ms-4ms per frame wall clock reduction.
• Optimized entity updates to save 2.5ms CPU time.

Project Achievements:

• Project revenue of $1.2-$1.4 billion on a budget, not including marketing, of $150-200 million.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the #4 best-selling game for 2010 - 2019 (NPD)
• Call of Duty: Ghosts was the #6 best-selling game for 2010 - 2019 (NPD)

Title: Lead Software Engineer

Company: Microsoft (Microsoft Xbox Studios)

Industry: Video Games

Dates of Employment: 2010/02 - 2011/01

Games Published: Kinect Adventures

Summary: Optimized the pack-in title for the Kinect launch. Due to the Kinect hardware, games have to be v-synced. With a target of 30 FPS, the next step was 20FPS which is a bad visual experience.

Management Accomplishments:

• Directed an internal team (5 people) and external contractors to refactor all of the game content for performance guarantees.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Reduced CPU time from 40ms+ to 32ms for 92% of game time.
• Increased MTBF from 10 minutes to over 70 hours.
• Solved OS level code defects in the Kinect OS support.

Title: Head of Core Technology Team, and Principle Engineer

Company: Obsidian Entertainment

Industry: Video Games

Dates of Employment: 2006/03 - 2009/11

Games Published: Neverwinter Nights 2, Alpha Protocol, Dungeon Siege III

Summary: Lead the core technology team to create an RPG-centric game engine and toolset.

Management Accomplishments:

• Managed a team of five to eight engineers as part of the core technology group.
• Liason with XFN partners for feature planning and timeline.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Responsible for design and primary development of the internal game engine used on multiple titles.
  • Cross-platform multi-threaded rendering system, resource manager, scene graph, data management, VFX system, and actor classes.
  • SPU implementation of skinning, shadow map filtering, and shader patching.
• Refactored Neverwinter Nights 2 rendering system to improve frame rate from 2FPS to 24-30FPS on Shader Model 2.0 hardware.
• Constructed a system to pre-generate navigation pathing information, a real-time path smoother, and obstacle avoidance.

Title: Simulation Engineer

Company: Terminal Reality

Industry: Video Games

Dates of Employment: 2003/10 - 2006/02

Games Published: BloodRayne 2, Aeon Flux, SpyHunter: Nowhere to Run

Summary: Created a high-performance physics simulation for the PS2 and Xbox, and core team member responsible for troubleshooting issues related to the engine code base.

Management Accomplishments:

• Liason with three product teams and supporting leads to support individual project requirements.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Integrated and heavily modified ODE (open source physics solver) to run on a PS2.
• Supported high-speed, small objects (player and AI controlled).
• Bullet-time effects where the player character ran at normal speed (interacting with the slowed objects).
• Large (30+) objects interacting in the same island (group).
• Created an arbitrary mesh to collision primitive contact point generator.
• Created a parametric flat-cylinder collision primitive.

Title: Head of Core Technology Team, and Principle Engineer

Company: Sunstorm Interactive

Industry: Video Games

Dates of Employment: 2001/04 - 2002/09

Games Published: Airport Tycoon 2, Mahjong, Bridge Builder.

Summary: Lead a core technology team to create an internal engine for small game projects (to be published on Real Arcade).

Management Accomplishments:

• Managed a core technology team of five engineers and tasking of an external art team.

Individual Accomplishments:

• Refactored internal small game engine:
  • 10x supported vertex and triangle counts.
  • Improve execution speed by over 10ms.
  • Allow for terrain mesh generated from a height map.
• Create a truss simulation for Bridge Builder

Cornell University, Masters of Business Administration

Queens University, Masters of Business Administration

University of Waterloo, Bachelor in Computer Science

University of Waterloo, Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering

International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP)

Project Management Institute (PMI)

Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

PMP - Project Managemnt Professional (from PMI)

CHPSE - Certified HIPAA Privacy and Security Expert (from Supremus)

CCSP - Certified Common Security Framework Practioner (from HiTrust)

CIPP/E - Certified Information Privacy Professional Europe (from IAPP)

CIPM - Certified Information Privacy Manager (from IAPP)

CIPT - Certified Information Privacy Technologist (from IAPP)

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IT Program & Project Management, Software Design & Development, Product Development, Team Leadership, Relationship Management, Coaching & Mentoring, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Negotiations, Strategic Planning, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Risk Assessment, Stakeholder Relations, Software Engineering, IT Troubleshooting, Process Improvements, Innovative Solutions, Revenue Growth, Due Diligence.