Olivier N.

Over 8 years, helped ship 6 VR mobile devices (from Oculus Go to Quest 3S), with 20+ million devices sold.

Tech Lead on multiple teams, including from System UIs (React and Android UI) to experimentations (with Meta infra) to performance (in AOSP), and budget enforcements. The landscape changed a lot over the years, and I spearheaded several new projects to address underserved problems, scaled them to production, then built and ramped up a new team around them for long-term improvements, so I could move on to the next big targets.

This involved major refactoring and optimization, defining and meeting KPIs, creating and negotiating targets and deliverables for many teams, and defining processes (including documentation, posts, and tools) to enforce them. Many of these projects were heavily cross-functional collaborations involving dozens of teams, so I often defined a technical direction that influenced 100+ engineers.

Spent a lot of time mentoring engineers to be more impactful or get promoted (from IC5 to IC7), as well as interviewing (in the top 10% of interviewers at Meta). In 2025, one of my focuses was on championing Better Engineering initiatives (codebase and tool improvements) to expand the impact of our VR engineers. This led to the exploration and integration of AI workflows to increase teams' productivity.

Cross compilation for multi-platform games – Mobile and Web: Contributed to and promoted the following technologies - PlayScript: Allows games written in ActionScript to run under Mono on mobile platforms with greater performance than Adobe Air. Unity Flash Exporter: Took over the deprecated Flash exporter and led the team to deliver Zynga's Unity mobile games for the Web. Initiated a strategic move for Zynga's mobile games for a lower dev cost.

Sharing of Technologies – 15 Unity and C# games: Drove a major technology sharing initiative at Zynga. Led several tech teams to make code reuse easier and more cost-effective. My contribution included delivering key components and tools to improve the team's adoption of the framework, as well as defining the overall architecture, processes, and best practices. Was instrumental in defining roadmaps and priorities. Started as a team of one and built a strong team of 15 people.

Ads – 25% of Zynga's revenue: Brought focus and process improvements to an understaffed team, distracted by a lot of firefighting. Delivered ad features and bug fixes that were impacting the bottom line, provided clarity on priorities and technology roadmaps, drove refactoring efforts and plans to fix technical debt, and collaborated with many 3rd party orgs.

Game - Portal 2: Metascore of 95 and received many awards

Performed many optimizations to ship a very polished game on PS3 and X360 to maintain a steady framerate, e.g., "blobulator" (SPU), sound (SIMD), asset streaming (IO, MP3, minimized latency issues), and other features.

Developed various server and client features, such as Facebook integration, improvements to the Admin website, pre-purchase offers in the web store, and features related to Steam sales.

Refactored the integration of RPC messages within Steam (servers and clients). Significantly simplified the creation and usage of messages in many components of Steam (SE productivity and code robustness).

Collaborated with 3rd party partner games - Rockstar and Ubisoft - for the integration of Steam store data into their games. Led special projects on pricing analysis, such as accurately measuring the effect of discounts on revenue and examining how market shares would be impacted if we (or our competitors) ran sales.