Professional Summary

Built and shipped F2P titles end-to-end — up to ~400K MAU — with custom Nakama/Heroic Cloud backend systems, LiveOps pipelines, scalable game architecture, and deep mobile performance work. Recovered 300K users’ saves in one week, cut backend infrastructure costs by 90%+, improved EA title FPS from 30–40 to 50–60 on target hardware, and maintained a 7+ year adapter-based SDK layer across provider churn. I actively develop and integrate AI-assisted engineering workflows when they create measurable leverage: faster delivery, clearer decisions, and better engineering focus.

What I Bring

🧠
Systems & Architecture
DDD, bounded contexts, adapter-based SDK boundaries, technical design docs, and risk registers before big bets — solutions that survive years and provider churn.
🔧
LiveOps & Backend
Nakama/Node backends (chat, clubs, mailbox, leaderboards, tournaments), remote config and A/B systems, Addressables pipelines — built so designers and LiveOps ship without blocking on engineering.
Performance & Crises
CPU/GPU profiling, batching, culling, DOD in hot paths — from EA FPS wins to ANR/crash firefights and tier-3 retention lifts when frame rate was bleeding revenue.
🚀
Leadership & Velocity
Structured mentoring, coding standards that evolve from real incidents, Scrum where it helped predictability — plus practical AI-assisted workflows that shipped gains, not demos.

Key Achievements

93% backend cost cut
PlayFab → Nakama/Node · full stack ownership
300K users in 7 days
Emergency identity recovery + cloud save design
~2× FPS at EA
SWGoH 30–40 → 50–60 on target devices
50 FPS / 300 units
Custom ECS, Nexus 5-class hardware
10–20% velocity
AI-assisted workflows (live mobile RPG)
7+ year SDK layer
Analytics, ads, attribution, payments adapters
20% retention lift
Low-end Android perf sprint · tier-3 revenue impact

Experience

Tech Lead — Nexters — Hero Wars Mobile
Jul 2025 – Apr 2026 · Remote / Lisbon, Portugal
  • Led a cross-functional engineering and QA team shipping a new 4X strategy mode in Hero Wars Mobile — an established live RPG with a large global audience
  • Raised scalability and client-side performance considerations for the shared global map early and helped guide implementation toward a smooth player experience
  • 10–20% faster delivery via AI-assisted engineering workflows across review, UI implementation, estimation, and task decomposition
  • Applied DDD and bounded-context thinking to support clean feature boundaries; moved the team to Scrum with clearer delivery cadence
  • Owned roadmap and stakeholder visibility (planning, dependencies); 1:1s, reviews, growth plans, hiring
Head of Software Engineering (hands-on · Architecture & Engineering Leadership) — Original Games
Oct 2020 – Mar 2025 · Lisbon, Portugal · Merge Inn, Mergedom, Juicy Stack
  • Primary execution force across lifecycle — gameplay, quests, modes, LiveOps; solo Mergedom migration; first content/offers system; Juicy Stack end-to-end as sole engineer
  • Refactored Merge Inn merge core from fragile state flags into a clear, maintainable flow; refactored Mergedom's Zenject DI after acquisition — replaced a chaotic dependency graph with deliberate module boundaries and an explicit UI → service → infrastructure call chain
  • Built multi-game social backend on Heroic Cloud / Nakama (TS, AQL): clubs, WebSocket chat, mailbox, leaderboards, tournaments — ~400K MAU / 90–100K DAU; avoided 2× scale-up via lean AQL reads
  • ~93% infra savings migrating PlayFab → internal stack with phased rollout guided by a written risk register; full stack ownership retained
  • Shipped designer-driven LiveOps config (nested logic/math, custom runtime interpreter in ~6 months) and Addressables tooling for remote assets, schedules, and A/B variants; rescued the project after two juniors stalled — rewrote ~50% of the implementation in 1.5 months to restore architectural integrity and meet deadline
  • 300K saves restored in under a week after post-acquisition identity crisis: iOS Keychain loss due to Team ID change — emergency fingerprinting system, PlayFab account matching, and cloud-save architecture originally designed for write-surge resilience
  • CI on Jenkins/TeamCity (signed iOS/Android, Firebase App Distribution, UTF/AltTester); 3 teams / 12 engineers + 4 QA; coding standards, test-driven practices, written technical design for identity and cloud save
  • Native iOS (Objective-C) bridges (ATT, overlays, ad adapters); analytics taxonomy + Mixpanel → Firebase; ANR/crash firefights and monetisation funnel analysis with product impact
  • Raised ATT compliance risk ahead of iOS 14 — roadmap adjusted; identified GDPR exposure and proposed a pragmatic hard-gate consent solution adopted across peer studios
  • Targeted performance sprint on low-end Android: 20% retention and revenue lift in tier-3 markets
Lead Software Engineer — Alchemical Inc. (now Original Games)
May 2018 – Oct 2020 · St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Hyper-casual end-to-end — e.g. Hyper Shot: Time Puzzle
  • Unity socket multiplayer with prediction/interpolation for 10–20 players
  • Cross-project SDK abstraction (analytics, ads, attribution, payments) — adapters survived 7+ years of provider churn
  • Data-oriented design on hot mobile paths; hiring
Lead Software Engineer — Harbor Crew (now Original Games)
Oct 2016 – May 2018 · St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Solo / near-solo casual titles — solitaire, darts, basketball, and others
  • Runtime expression evaluator for ad monetisation JSON + Unity Editor tooling for monetisation authors
  • Performance on mid/low-end Android & iOS; hiring
Lead Software Engineer — EPAM Systems
Feb 2016 – Oct 2016 · St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Senior → Lead in 6 months
  • Mobile medical report visualisation with domain experts — logarithmic scaling, distributions, statistical summaries (M.S. applied maths)
Contractor Software Engineer II — Electronic Arts
May 2015 – Dec 2015 · St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes — batching, frustum culling, 30–40 → 50–60 FPS on target devices
  • Scrabble — logic/allocation tuning; production crashes debugged without local repro
  • Globally distributed teams
Software Engineer — AggroStudios
Nov 2013 – Feb 2016 · St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Mobile RTS — 50 FPS on Nexus 5 with 200–300 units; custom C# ECS (SoA, minimal GC)
  • Navigation + unit state machines; HLSL/CG terrain blend and overdraw reduction
  • Google Cardboard VR; multithreaded pathfinding/AI with main-thread sync dispatcher
Software Engineer — Happy Kids / Panoramik Inc / Topface
2010 – 2013 · St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Two VK games as sole Flash/ActionScript client engineer (Topface)
  • Interactive bookstore + microbiology educational title for young children — Unity & Cocos2d-x/Lua (Happy Kids)
  • Casual web/mobile work in ActionScript/Flash and C#/Unity (Panoramik)

Technical Skills

Engines & Platforms
Unity (14 yrs) Cocos Creator Cocos2d-x iOS Android Nintendo Switch PC Telegram Mini Apps Flash / ActionScript VR (Cardboard)
Languages
C# .NET TypeScript Node.js Objective-C C++
Backend & Cloud
Heroic Cloud / Nakama Firebase Google Cloud AWS Azure PlayFab REST WebSockets SQL BigQuery DevOps CI/CD Jenkins TeamCity App Store Connect Firebase App Distribution
Game Systems
Progression & economy Inventory & offers Quests & config Cloud save Content delivery Multiplayer Subscriptions & IAP LiveOps & A/B Addressables Asset Bundles ECS / DOD MVVM / MVP / DDD Strategy / State Observer / Event Bus Adapter / Proxy Service Locator Factory / Command
Performance
CPU / GPU profiling Draw calls & batching Culling Memory Multithreading Network optimisation Mobile performance
Analytics & Monetisation
Mixpanel Kochava Google Analytics Adjust AppsFlyer Tenjin Tableau AppLovin IronSource Balancy Userwise A/B testing
Architecture & Graphics
System design DDD / bounded contexts Technical design documents Internal SDKs & tooling Dependency & versioning Technical risk HLSL / CG Terrain / 2D–3D Applied mathematics (M.S.)
Leadership & Process
Scrum / Agile Team management Mentoring & coaching Coding standards Hiring AI-assisted workflows Knowledge transfer
Version control
Git SVN Mercurial
Testing
Unit testing TDD Unity Test Framework AltTester
AI Tools
Claude Cursor Gemini Codex Multi-Agents

Additional Experience

Freelance Unity — Nintendo Switch porting (NDA)
Racing title

Platform integration, input, performance for Switch constraints, certification prep.

Personal projects — Cocos Creator / Telegram Mini Apps
Shipped & live

Two casual games on Telegram: monetisation, ads, cloud save via Telegram APIs — evaluation of Cocos Creator after Unity runtime-fee changes.

Personal projects — Unity toolset (UPM)
Ongoing

Reusable Unity toolset distributed as UPM packages — adapters, LLM-oriented development utilities, and SDK-layer ideas continued from the studio years; TDD on critical modules.

Open source — KidsLock for Android TV
Parental screen time

Built for home use; published for families without built-in TV restrictions — github.com/yanmasharski/kidlock-tv.

Languages

English
Professional
Belarusian
Native
Russian
Native
Ukrainian
Professional
Portuguese
Beginner

Education

🎓
M.S. in Applied Mathematics
Saint Petersburg State Electrotechnical University "LETI"
2006 – 2012

Projects

Merge Inn — Tasty Match Puzzle
Original Games · Jan 2019 – Mar 2025

Google Play · App Store

Mergedom: Home Design & Merge
Original Games · Dec 2022 – Jul 2024

Google Play · App Store

Juicy Stack. Block&Tile Puzzle
Original Games · Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 · sole engineer end-to-end

No store URL on LinkedIn

TileStack
Alchemical Inc.

Google Play

Basketball Roll — Shoot Hoops
Alchemical Inc.

Google Play

Classic Spider Solitaire Cards
Alchemical Inc.

Google Play

Other titles — Alchemical / Harbor Crew
2016 – 2020 · no confirmed store URLs on LinkedIn

Darts: King of Champions · Daily Spider Solitaire · Solitaire HD · Ball Toss Alley · Wood Block The Puzzle Game · Hyper Shot: Time Puzzle · Food Battle · Space Conflict: Battle Arena · Sushi Train Arcade · Weigh It 3D Puzzle · Card Match · Balls Deep Pearl Diving Game · Yummy Pump · Orbitz Planet Simulator

Traps for Friends
AggroStudios · Mar 2014 – Jul 2014 · castle builder + traps PvP

Postmortem (Gamasutra)

Other titles — EA / AggroStudios
2013 – 2016 · no store URLs on LinkedIn

Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes (EA) · Scrabble (EA) · Earth Liberation · Zombie Train Survival Fight · Go Fish Go · Triangles · AScreen · VR Project #1 & #2

HappyKids
HappyKids · Aug 2012 – Nov 2013 · children's interactive content shelf

App Store

Blobbies
HappyKids · Sep 2012 – Nov 2012 · fine motor skill game for kids

App Store

Eskimo-girl
HappyKids · Jan 2013 · cartoon app for kids

App Store

Tower Storm
Panoramik Inc. · May 2012 – Aug 2012 · mobile action-strategy F2P

Google Play

Karlson VS Martians
Topface · Jan 2011 – Mar 2011 · casual

VK

Other titles — Panoramik / Topface
2010 – 2013 · no store URLs on LinkedIn

Ancient World · Detki · Bomber