Tess Winlock

Passionate game developer and designer with over 13 years of software engineering experience, driven to create inclusive and engaging experiences for diverse audiences.

Game Dev Work

Tombstone Taxi

I joined Tombstone Taxi roughly 18 months into its development and act as a software engineer on the project.I created character abilities and have led the development in the alternate ammo system, including the development of the UI and implementation.

Janni's Jinxed Journey (IGA Lvl 2)

Explore a lush island and save your people from the colonial invaders using stealth and magic!I am the solo dev on this project working with the guidance of the IGA Level 2 course.

  • The course handed the class many resources to build a Spyro like game, but I re-implemented the vast majority of the system to create a stealth platformer vaguely inspired by Sly Cooper.

  • I acted as game designer, programmer, and had a hand in visual arts (cleaning up and altering Synty assets).

  • I built a stealth system from the ground up, creating vision cones, light-based detection (using very simple colliders) and a propagating-but-forgiving alarm propagation system that alerts nearby guards to the player’s presence.

  • I also wrote all dialog for the game, and utilized FMOD for all the audio.

Moving in and Moving on (Ludem Dare 55)

As a part of the Ludem Dare 55 game jam, I was part of a small team of 6 as the sole engineer working in the Game Maker engine.

  • I acted as both game designer and game programmer, guiding and responding to the team’s desire to build a very narrative and visual heavy game. As this was for a 72 hour jam, we cut scope down to the bare minimum to increase the chances that we nailed the deadline.

  • I worked as the primary developer creating the vast majority of core gameplay systems including: UI (game maker lacks a UI system), journal, dialog choices, technical choices (such as using Yarn to work productively with the narrative team), and implementing all levels.

  • The most difficult element was the UI, as game maker lacks any traditional UI system I created the text boxes, buttons, and sprite animation containers from the ground up. I also worked to integrate these into our chosen dialog system, Yarn, which allowed the narrative team to control things like objective tracking, item collection and journal lore.

  • We completed our Jam on time and placed 585/1582.

About

Heya! My name is Tess, and I am a recovering corporate drone with over 13 years of professional software engineering experience in the Financial Tech industry. I am now a passionate game developer and game designer for both the table and screen.In my current role, I work as a gameplay programmer, crafting experiences and collaborating directly with the lead game designer to build exciting gameplay for our players. In my previous career, I led a team of 13 as a manager, spearheaded several projects as the technical lead, and successfully completed countless tasks as an individual contributor.As an avid queer black gamer, my dream is to create cool experiences that others like me can enjoy. In my spare time, I love to run TTRPGs (Cortex & FATE being my favorites), maintain a blog at wandering-table.com, and spend time with my adorable dog.Checkout my blog on TTRPGs

Contact

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Here's my most recent work history, for more details and additional work history, see my LinkedIn or contact me to see my resume.

Staff Software Engineer, Cash App Community Jan. 2022 – March 2023

  • I acted as the technical lead of the Community organization, aligning technical priorities with product priorities to maximize our team’s velocity.

  • I acted as both a technical consultant and IC where tough problems arise.

  • I worked in concert with my peer EMs to drive tough technical problems, including mitigating ML impact during our decomposition of our payments monolith.

  • Led senior engineers across the organization to hammer out tough technical questions and improve our processes and technical systems.

  • Led the technical direction for tough, cross organizational problems.

  • Designed and implemented systems and common patterns that are shared across the organization including a generic entity graph.

Software Engineer, Cash App Investing Jul. 2020 – Dec. 2021

  • Led a team of 9 engineers through the design, architecture, and implementation of a social investing feature. Negotiated requirements with PMs, leadership, managed the project execution across a wide variety of roles (Data, Mobile, Server).

  • led a team of 3 engineers through the design, architecture, and implementation of investing alerts, quickly notifying millions of customers about changes to their portfolio. Negotiated SLAs with platform teams to meet tight product requirements.

  • Was the tech lead of a group of 6 engineers working on user portfolio management. Clarified the team’s technical strategy, ownership and designed the team’s oncall practices to optimise for reliability, expertise, and avoiding alert fatigue.

Software Engineer Manager, Machine Learning Platform Feb. 2017 – July. 2020

  • Managed the infrastructure team responsible for building the data tools that power all of square’s automated decisioning and statistical modeling systems. Built a simple and expressive platform for engineering data features, recording and querying graph connections and serving data with low latency and high availability.

  • Led the team’s strategy, transforming from a risk team to a ML platform team empowering all of Block.

  • Scaled the machine learning velocity of the company through a focus on scalability and usability. Growing from supporting 10 data scientists in 2017 to over 100 in 2020.

  • Held the team accountable to a high technical bar, maintaining high accuracy to support heavily regulated products while also supporting our low latency and high traffic needs.

  • Scaled from a team of 4 to a team of 12, building a diverse and inclusive environment. Managed the performance needs of my reports, the needs of the 10+ customer organizations, budgets, and contracts