I work on the layer between the people making something and that thing actually reaching an audience. Build and release infrastructure, CI/CD, internal tooling. When it is working, nobody mentions it.
Ten years of it now, split between animation production pipelines and game development.
Three of those jobs were at the same studio, at three separate times, which I choose to read as a good sign.
Playhead, since May 2026
playhead.fm, an AI-powered music mixing and production tool.
Same job, different room. It is still software built for people doing creative work, aimed at getting the machinery out from between them and the thing they are trying to make. The difference is who is on the other side of it: musicians, producers, and mixing engineers, rather than animators, VFX artists, and game designers.
The problems rhyme more than you would expect them to. Somebody is trying to make something, and in the way of it sits a pile of technical work that is not the thing. Whether that pile is a render queue or a mix session, most of what you learn about clearing it carries over.
That is not a connection I noticed afterwards and tidied up into a story. It is why I took the job.
Mixim, since 2024
Nights and weekends, alongside the day job, for about two years now.
Mixim builds automated cocktail machines for bars and venues. I have designed and assembled PCBs for it, written firmware, and worked on assorted other parts of the machine.
I am not a hardware engineer by trade. I am a software person who kept picking up the soldering iron until the boards worked, which is more or less how I have learned everything else on this page.
Mighty Coconut, 2021 to 2026
Software Engineer, then DevOps Lead.
The automated Unity build and release pipelines behind Walkabout Mini Golf were stood up by an external engineering firm brought in before I arrived. I inherited them, then spent years improving and maintaining them: eight or more platforms out of one codebase, over and over, through launch and years of DLC and live operations. The game ships on Quest, Rift, Pico, SteamVR, Viveport, PSVR2, and iOS.
Taking over somebody else’s build system is its own discipline. You do not get to choose the shape of it, you inherit every decision without the reasoning behind it, and it has to keep shipping the whole time you are changing it.
Build times came down by about 85% across that stretch, through a mix of pipeline and infrastructure work. The number is the part people repeat, but what it actually bought was a build you run whenever you want instead of one you schedule your afternoon around.
The rest of it: CI/CD on Jenkins, Perforce, and AWS. Hybrid on-prem and cloud infrastructure for a distributed team of 35 and up. Localization across every platform. Platform SDK integration across a lot of XR and mobile targets, including hardware that is still yet to ship. Internal Unity tools aimed at the parts of a release cycle where people were losing hours to debugging.
Rooster Teeth, 2019 to 2021
QA Technical Artist, then Software Engineer.
Both Lazer Team films were Rooster Teeth productions, and I had worked on them from the vendor side at two different studios before I ever worked here. This industry is smaller than it looks.
Animation rather than games, and the same problems in different clothes. I built pipeline automation that took manual steps out of production, and artist-facing tools and integrations for the people actually doing the work. Started on render farm infrastructure and regression testing against the pipeline tools, which is a useful way to learn a pipeline: you find out first where it breaks.
The hardest part of that job was never the building. It was communicating what was possible to artists and producers, and then keeping their trust once I had it.
A pipeline sits between people and their own work. Done well it is invisible, and done badly it costs somebody a day they do not get back. That asymmetry makes trust the whole currency: it accumulates slowly and it does not survive many withdrawals. Most of what I know about working with artists rather than at them, I learned here.
Mighty Coconut, 2016 to 2019
Pipeline Technical Director and Unity Developer.
I was brought on for Kings of Atlantis, an animated series that ran thirteen episodes in 2017. IMDb credits me as a digital artist, which is one way of saying compositing, render wrangling, pipeline, and IT. That is the shape of a small studio: the job is whatever currently stands between the show and the finish line.
The render farm for it was Redshift on GPUs. It outlived the show by years, and the same machines turned up again later as the ones building a golf game.
My hand in Lazer Team 2 was much lighter. I was on the pipeline and render farm side for that show, tracked a handful of shots, and composited about six of them.
After the series: Unity mobile titles on iOS and Android, the studio’s automated production pipelines, and the infrastructure underneath all of it.
MoontowerVFX, 2014 to 2016
Digital Compositor and Pipeline Technical Director. My first full time job in the industry, and the reason I do this one.
I was hired as a compositor. About three weeks in, the producer asked whether anyone wanted to take a stab at building some tools to ingest the plates we were getting from editorial. I raised my hand, and then taught myself Python so that raising it would turn out to have been true.
After that I wrote little Nuke tools in between working on shots. Nothing clever. They just got used.
We were on crunch and it was brutal. I remember standing in the studio at four in the morning watching everyone plug away at an enormous amount of work, and thinking:
If I can write a small tool that gets used a hundred times a day and saves sixty seconds, everyone can get just that much more sleep each night.
I built a few of those. That is when I fell in love with programming, and it is more or less what I have been doing ever since.
The rest of the job was compositing shots by day and maintaining the render farm everything depended on. Being the person who both uses the pipeline and maintains it is a fast education in which parts of it are actually annoying.
Credited as a digital compositor on Lazer Team (2015).
Mighty Coconut, August to October 2014
Intern, for a few months, shortly before Moontower. This is where all of it actually started, and the reason I knew the place well enough to go back twice.
Shipped Titles
Walkabout Mini Golf (Quest, Rift, Pico, SteamVR, Viveport, PSVR2, iOS) · 57° North (iOS, Android) · Laser Mazer (iOS, Android)
Screen Credits
Lazer Team (2015), digital compositor · Kings of Atlantis (2017), digital artist, thirteen episodes.
Also
Taught a couple classes as part of SHG201, Intermediate Shotgun for FXPHD in 2018.
B.S. in Visual Effects and Motion Graphics, The Art Institute of Austin.