Dylan Heyes

MahiGaming — Las Vegas, NV

Platform Architecture & Modernization

• Platform Modernization: Designed and architected a modern, organization-wide game-development platform that replaced the legacy stack, serving as its technical lead through implementation, migration, evolution, and adoption across four studios, with more than 100 game titles shipped on the platform.
• Scale & Efficiency: A single shared runtime across every title processes 120M+ game rounds daily in regulated U.S. and European markets, eliminating per-game engine rebuilds and substantially reducing the engineering, certification, and maintenance effort to ship and operate each game.
• Extensibility & Reuse: Designed a plugin-driven, composable architecture for gameplay, UI, and features, with game-specific logic authored as runtime-interpreted node graphs, extensible by any discipline and safely evolved across live titles.
• Slot-Math Engine: Provided architectural guidance and oversight for a new, highly innovative slot-math engine, developed in partnership with the studio's principal mathematician, steering its design through to successful delivery.
• Patented Innovation: Co-invented a deterministic, seed-based system for generating reel outcomes, awarded U.S. Patent 12,579,865 (assigned to Games Global).

Developer Tooling & Internal Systems

• Visual Authoring Environment: Designed and architected an integrated, Unity-like visual authoring environment, personally building the initial implementation before expanding the team and continuing to lead its architecture and development. Its modular plugin architecture let other developers safely extend its capabilities, and real-time iteration, hot reload, and live desktop/mobile previews made it a daily tool for engineers, designers, QA, and marketing.
• Full-Stack Systems: Designed and delivered multiple full-stack internal tools and services supporting development, operations, and leadership workflows using React, Node.js/NestJS, FastAPI, Apollo GraphQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.

Engineering Standards & Compliance

• Automated Testing & CI/CD: Designed and implemented an automated testing framework integrated into the platform and CI/CD pipeline, establishing unit and end-to-end testing, linting, and code review as engineering standards enforced through studio-wide CI (~1-hour pipelines) for quality, compliance, and release readiness.
• Regulated Environment: Established engineering controls and documented development processes supporting the studio's ISO audits and gaming-regulatory compliance.

Generative AI

• Generative-AI Initiative: Served as the technical lead and primary architect for a generative-AI initiative for slot-game development, defining the system architecture and guiding its implementation and integration with the development platform through bespoke, human-in-the-loop tooling that pairs custom-trained models with designer and engineer review.
• Custom Models & Infrastructure: Built custom training-data generation, model fine-tuning, and evaluation/integration tooling on Microsoft AI Foundry, wiring models directly into the authoring pipeline rather than relying on off-the-shelf APIs.

Leadership & Culture

• Leadership & Scope: As the company's senior-most engineer, reporting directly to the CEO, provided technical leadership across 20+ engineers and its North American studios after progressing from senior engineer to principal architect.
• Executive Partnership: Served as the primary technical partner to executive leadership, aligning business strategy, regulatory constraints, platform direction, and long-term technical investment.
• Culture Transformation: Transformed a previously siloed and adversarial culture into a collaborative, ownership-driven organization through transparent technical processes and shared documentation.
• Knowledge Sharing: Created and hosted a weekly voluntary platform forum for 5+ years that brought together engineers, artists, designers, and QA, regularly attended by ~50% of the company, driving cross-discipline alignment and platform evolution.
• Mentorship & Growth: Led mentorship and talent development via formal quarterly reviews with SMART goals, direct coaching, and promotion advocacy (including outside engineering).

Lead Game Developer (2018 – 2023)

• Legacy Engine: Principal contributor to the studio's existing game engine, developing and evolving shared systems, tooling, and architecture used across its game portfolio; this legacy stack was later replaced by the modern platform above.
• Game Development: Led game-development efforts while contributing to the architecture, maintainability, and ongoing evolution of the shared engine and supporting tooling.

Independent R&D / Sabbatical

• Generative Game Math: Built a tool that designs slot-game math models using genetic algorithms, automatically evolving reel layouts and pay tables toward target volatility and return-to-player profiles.
• Full-Stack Platform: Designed and built a complete social-casino platform (frontend + backend) as a production-quality prototype, exercising end-to-end architecture from game client through services and data.

Gamesys — Las Vegas, NV

• Engine Modernization: Principal contributor to the studio's Flash → HTML5 engine migration, developing shared engine systems behind social-casino titles generating ~$5M in monthly revenue.
• Live Operations: Operated in high-traffic, revenue-critical environments, collaborating across product, design, math, and QA.

Genesis Gaming — Las Vegas, NV

• Engine Architecture: Designed and built a casino game engine from scratch, establishing the core architecture and development patterns that standardized game creation across the studio.