Lena Hartmann Senior Game Developer
Burbank, CA • gamedev@gmail.com • +1 818-555-0147
Profile Summary
- Senior Game Developer with 9 years of experience shipping AAA console and PC action-adventure games across combat, traversal, and open-world systems, specializing in gameplay programming, animation integration, and performance optimization on console.
- Solid technical background across engines (Unreal Engine 5, Unity 6), languages (C++, Blueprints), rendering on DirectX 12 and shader authoring in HLSL, target platforms PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, multiplayer on authoritative client-server with rollback, and live ops covering seasonal content drops, A/B tests, and telemetry-driven balance patches, with strong fundamentals in frame-budget discipline, data-oriented design, and a designer-friendly tools mindset.
- Deep expertise in gameplay systems and combat-state machines, ECS / component-based architecture and data-oriented design, shader authoring and post-processing in HLSL, and frame-pacing and memory budget on console, applying practices such as navmesh, behavior trees, and animation state machines and editor-tools authoring for designers to deliver ship-quality, perf-clean, and designer-friendly gameplay code.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Design, Art, Animation, Audio, QA, and Production in milestone-paced production with weekly playtests, contributing to gameplay-design reviews, perf war rooms, and post-launch retrospectives with a pragmatic, ship-it-then-polish mindset.
- Senior engineer who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of code-review rigor and playtest-driven iteration discipline through code-review coaching and tool-building, while running weekly gameplay-engineering guild sessions and authoring widely adopted gameplay-pattern and tools handbooks.
Technical Skills
- Engines & Languages:
- Unreal Engine 5 (C++ + Blueprints), Unity 6 (C#), Godot 4 (GDScript / C#), proprietary engines, GitHub, Perforce
- Gameplay & Systems:
- Combat state machines, traversal, weapon systems, ECS, component-based architecture, data-oriented design, gameplay tags
- Graphics & Rendering:
- HLSL / GLSL shaders, PBR materials, Lumen / Nanite, post-processing, DirectX 12, Vulkan, Metal, ray tracing fundamentals
- Physics, Animation & AI:
- Chaos / PhysX, animation state machines, IK, navmesh + A* pathfinding, behavior trees, finite state machines, blackboards
- Performance & Profiling:
- Unreal Insights, Unity Profiler, RenderDoc, PIX, RGP, frame-pacing, LOD authoring, draw-call batching, GPU memory budget
- Multiplayer & Networking:
- Replication, lag compensation, rollback netcode, dedicated-server hosting, matchmaking, anti-cheat fundamentals
- Tools & Pipeline:
- Editor extensions, Blueprint nodes, asset import pipelines, Houdini / Maya bridges, Python automation, build automation
- Platforms & Live Ops:
- PS5 + Xbox Series X|S + PC Steam, Switch (cross-vendor study), Steamworks, PSN, Xbox Live, telemetry pipelines, A/B testing
Education
Work Experience
- Own gameplay programming for a flagship action-adventure title on PS5, covering the traversal, melee combat, and gadget systems with influence across 14 gameplay engineers across 3 pods.
- Designed the gameplay systems around component-based ECS with gameplay-tag dispatch, scaling to 120+ gameplay components and 40 ability classes and cut designer iteration loops from 30s to 4s.
- Authored character shaders and post-processing stack in HLSL with PBR materials and screen-space effects, delivering 2.4ms GPU-time savings per frame on PS5.
- Built enemy behavior trees, navmesh A*, and full-body IK for combat encounters, shipping 20+ enemy archetypes shipped to 8 mission types.
- Drove the perf pass to hit locked 60 FPS on PS5 performance mode, pulling frame time from 19.4 ms to 16.2 ms and shipping clean 60 FPS across 14 of 14 review-flagged scenes.
- Owned co-op replication and lag-compensation pass across dedicated servers, lifting hit-reg accuracy from 87% to 98% at 120 ms RTT across the launch window.
- Built editor extensions for ability authoring editor and combat-tuning sliders, adopted by 12 designers across 3 disciplines and cited in 2 internal postmortems as a top-3 production accelerator.
- Partnered with Design, Art, Animation, Audio, and Production across the live-service flow, contributing to 3 champions and 2 game modes shipped to live across the period.
- Owned telemetry events + A/B test framework for the gameplay team, running 18+ live experiments and lifted D7 retention by 6.2% on a flagship mode.
- Mentored 3 mid-career engineers through senior gameplay work, supporting 2 promotions to Senior, and authored the team's gameplay code-review handbook adopted across 4 squads.
- Partnered with Design, Art, Animation, Audio, QA, and Production teams across 14 patches and 4 seasonal events, authoring 22 release-readiness and live-ops runbooks that became the team's release baseline and onboarding 5 new gameplay engineers into the team's release-cadence workflow.