Allan Deutsch

Contact Info & Links

Skills

Technologies

  • CSS & Tailwind
  • React
  • C++
  • TypeScript

SWE skills

  • API design
  • Application testing
  • CICD pipelines
  • Concurrency

Product skills

  • Data analysis
  • Product strategy
  • Responsive web
  • User empathy

Platforms

  • Desktop OS
  • NodeJS
  • Vercel
  • Web browsers

Professional Experience

Founder

- Doc Duck | Actionable feedback for developer documentation
  • Implemented a frontend-agnostic widget that enables documentation readers to provide feedback inline.
  • Developed a feedback dashboard for visualizing, tracking, and managing documentation feedback.
  • Configured linting, testing, and a GitHub actions workflow to automatically validate changes on all PRs.
  • Built session-based authentication in postgresDB with email confirmation, timed 2FA, and password reset to protect private data.
  • Crafted a backend Feedback API that enables anonymous users on 3rd-party docs sites to provide feedback.

Head of Engineering and Product

Ikigai Technologies | Grabbit on-chain NFT auction house
  • Aligned the leadership team on a community growth program and transitioned it to bizdev for a successful launch.
  • Cultivated a culture of collaboration and ownership by nurturing cross-discipline collaboration and individual autonomy.
  • Oversaw 100% incident-free releases by fostering technical excellence and accountability in the engineering team.
  • Defined the product strategy and roadmap and drove clarity and execution across the organization.

Senior Software Engineer Manager

- Ikigai Technologies | Grabbit on-chain NFT auction house assets
  • Executed a technology pivot that resulted in shipping 8 months ahead of schedule.
  • Defined our entire hiring & interview pipeline and successfully filled all role openings with excellent hires in 7-45 days.
  • Hired and led a 7-developer team developing 2 products and handling DevOps and smart contracts for 4 products.
  • Implemented process & tooling improvements that improved average PR completion time from ~3 days to under 1 day.
  • Developed full stack NFT minting feature and pages for viewing an NFT, browsing NFTs, and browsing auctions.
  • Increased dev velocity by 5x by pivoting our tech stack to one better aligned with product & engineering needs.

Senior Software Engineer

Ikigai Technologies | Fine art marketplace
  • Implemented the end-to-end auction experience in NextJS with TypeScript in collaboration with our UX designer.
  • Improved frontend development and onboarding velocity by integrating StorybookJS and authoring component stories.
  • Partnered with our business team to clearly define our niche and customers and align the dev roadmap with them.

Technical Product Manager II

- Microsoft | Game Developer Experience - SaaS and PaaS offerings for developers
  • Defined and drove roadmap execution across 10 services, including core PaaS infrastructure during 5x MAU growth.
  • Reduced turnaround on the slowest dev support requests from months to minutes by creating a resolution process.
  • Leveraged technical expertise to support developer customers by identifying, prioritizing, and resolving service issues.
  • Fostered a diverse and inclusive culture by leading and mentoring early-in-career employees in the organization.
  • Directed a $5m+ annual service budget for SaaS and PaaS offerings for game developers from indie to enterprise size.

Product Management Consultant

- Ikon Games - Independent Product Management Consultant
  • Developed a marketing campaign that Ikon used to reach ~50K impressions and convert ~30% into purchases.
  • Created a product strategy that enabled Ikon to grow from pre-revenue to ~$100K in 1 year shipping 2 Xbox games.

Technical Product Manager

- Microsoft | Advanced Technology Group - Game Developer Education
  • Achieved 100% "good" quality documentation coverage for new features by launching a "no docs, no ship" campaign.
  • Raised >90% of ~3000 docs to "good" quality, and drove resolution of all known doc bugs for major SDK releases by aligning organizations across Microsoft to fill key documentation gaps for Xbox Series X|S launch.
  • Produced all 12 of Microsoft's GDC '19 presentations by orchestrating cross-discipline and cross-org collaboration.
  • Raised Xbox developer satisfaction 23% by leading a team of four developers to improve Xbox Line of Business tools.
  • Created visibility & alignment across the organization by building BI dashboards that clarified priorities & work status.

Product Manager Intern

Microsoft | Advanced Technology Group
  • Analyzed 10 developer ecosystems, leveraged findings & insights to define a roadmap for the Xbox ecosystem.
  • Aligned leadership across four organizations on the roadmap for improving the Xbox developer experience.
  • Authored guide on advanced PowerBI technique used in reports and partnered with PowerBI team to publish it.

Software Engineer Intern

Microsoft | Xbox Game Studios - Global Game Publishing
  • Decreased average per-second AI execution from 33ms to 15ms by optimizing cache utilization.
  • Analyzed telemtry to find and address inefficiencies, increasing model loading performance over 300%.
  • Prevented release-blocking performance regressions by implementing automated performance testing.
  • Collaborated with three designers to resolve two progression-blocking design issues in gameplay.

Selected Industry Contributions & Accolades

SeattleJS - Community Organizer and Speaker

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  • Grew meetup attendance by 75% by increasing the content quantity, adding sponsors, and improving the venue.
  • Speaker, August 2024:"Classy JavaScript," JS language fundamentals and improvements for OOP.
  • Speaker, May 2024: "Branded types" in TypeScript, a technique for selectively introducing nominal type safety.

Other industry contributions & accolades

Selected Projects

Wealthy.FYI - personalized investing recommendations to minimize your tax burden

2021

Development Manager

- Resistor | Pseudo 3D Action Puzzle Game
  • Oversaw the architecture and implementation of the game engine, as well as overall design direction for the game.
  • Analyzed tradeoffs of design decisions for technical debt and functionality to maintain the code base quality.
  • Established development practices such as code reviews to minimize technical debt and increase productivity.

Head of Engineering and Product

- Sand Garden | Terraforming game played using a real sand box | “It's pretty cool!” - Bill Gates
  • Finalist in alt.ctrl.GDC 2017.
  • DigiPen showcase title for PAX West 2016.
  • Developed an efficient game engine in C++ which powered a large, constantly changing world at a consistent 60+ FPS.
  • Improved dev & content iteration velocity by implementing code generation and multi-threaded asset hot-reloading.
  • Empowered designers to make informed decisions by building a telemetry system integrated with gameanalytics.com.
  • Managed the team and project using Agile methodologies to adapt to moving goalposts during development
  • Delivered monthly milestone progress presentations to 4 project stakeholders.

Product Manager

- Rebound | 2D Action Puzzle-Platformer
  • Mentored the developers working on the game engine to ensure they built a solid tech foundation for the game.
  • Maintained open lines of communication between a team with diverse specialties.
  • Organized the project schedule by tracking weekly and milestone tasks.
  • Guided the team through creating and developing a unified vision of what the product should be.

Software Engineer Lead, Project Manager

- Breakfast Apocalypse | 2D Breakfast-Themed Roguelike
  • DigiPen selection for submission to IGF and IndieCade competitions.
  • Implemented profiling tools which led to a 500% increase in game performance, resulting in a smooth runtime.
  • Shipped 5 weeks early by planning and scheduling effectively and accurately anticipating upcoming challenges.
  • Developed the core game engine for the project from scratch using C++11.
  • Handled large game design/concept changes quickly by architecting the code to be robust and reusable.

Software Engineer

Behavior Tree Framework | Research Project
  • Enhanced developer experience by generating all framework boilerplate code using a preprocessor.
  • Crafted the framework for easy integration and it shipped in 3 games and was turned into the base for a class project.
  • Accelerated designer workflow by enabling runtime tree hotloading and GUI manipulation via serialization.

Education

Professional development

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Master of Business Administration, Honors

- Quantic School of Business and Technology

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

- DigiPen Institute of Technology
  • Founder and President: Product Management Club, C++ Club
  • President: Game Engine Architecture Club