Ioannis Boutsikas

Software engineer on the UI and Graphics teams for Ara: History Untold, a historical grand strategy game published by Microsoft and XBOX.

• Part of a cross-disciplinary team to audit and standardize the game's UI.
• Designed and implemented a library of custom UI components in a proprietary framework to enforce standardization.
• Created data-driven tools for the UI framework allowing artists to create dynamic assets, eliminating hand-authored trivial work.
• Added in-engine tools (UI Inspector, in-game decoration asset picker) giving artists more control and debugging information.
• Designed and implemented graphics tech for the nuclear weapons feature (shaders + system logic).
• Maintained the multi-threaded city renderer and procedural decoration system through visual improvements and bug fixes.

Under the Bay is a mobile, educational AR experience about the Chesapeake Bay. Users interact with and learn about microorganisms living in the Bay, with real-time water quality data guiding the experience. Published on iOS and Android.

• Integrated biologist expertise with visual artist vision to develop a 3D augmented reality experience.
• Architected a system allowing artists to orchestrate hundreds of micro-organisms and bind behaviors to water quality metrics.
• Developed an Android and iOS application in Unity (C#) providing an immersive under-water experience.
• Created native plugins to expose Android/iOS controls directly in Unity through a familiar interface.
• Optimized application performance, shaders, and assets for phone environments (3 GB RAM).
• Deployed an ASP.NET REST API on GCP to provide real-time water quality data from 10 stations.

Graduate assistant for Operating Systems, Graphics for Games, and Computer Graphics.

• Developed projects in C++ and Unreal Engine; held lectures on GPU hardware and architecture.
• Hosted tutoring sections introducing modern OpenGL to students.
• Developed kernel and user-space projects; held lectures on robust C and kernel programming.
• Created GUI tools in Angular + Electron to introduce students to Linux and kernel development.
• Designed interactive, responsive websites with course content to facilitate mobile device usage.
• Led a team of 5 assistants, driving collaboration across diverse cultural backgrounds.

Software engineer and IT for an agricultural company.

• Planned, deployed, and managed small-scale on-premises infrastructure based on Proxmox.
• Containerized and deployed existing applications to private infrastructure.
• Developed internal websites, tools, and knowledge bases using .NET and Angular.