iOS & Android SaaS SDKs

During the smartphone era that began with the iPhone, I transitioned from an IC game developer to building and leading teams of client facing engineers. We maintained and supported SDKs enabling other developers to integrate our SaaS services into their own iOS and Android apps and games.

The first of these roles was with OpenFeint, a service that made it easy to add competitive and social elements to mobile games. At first, I worked alone or alongside a salesperson to reach out to game developers and get them to let me integrate our SDKs into a branch of their source code for free. After getting about ten well recognized games to publish with our services, we leveraged their endorsements to get developers to do the integration work themselves. This required me to shift my attention to documenting and supporting the integration process. At the time that our service peeked in popularity, I had built out a team of ten to keep up with demand.

In my second role promoting SaaS services to mobile developers, I represented AppURL, a deep linking protocol created by Quixey, a mobile focussed search engine. AppURL was relatively simple to support allowing me to spend a larger portion of my time presenting the technology directly to enterprise partners and speaking at events. I also brought in contractors to scale up our internal web crawling and scraping efforts. Quixey’s motivation to promote deep linking and gather web content complemented the search engine with mobile optimized search results leading users into pages within the apps that best satisfied their search intents and offering to get the apps installed when desired. I would have stayed with this company past 2015 had they been willing to grow at a more sustainable rate without extreme levels of debt and wasteful spending that broke my confidence and ultimately led to their 2017 collapse.

I was recruited by game industry friends to join Fyber in 2015 to lead Solutions Engineering for their US office. As an ads platform focused on mobile games, my team was responsible for helping game developers worldwide to monetize their apps through our iOS and Android SDKs and helping advertisers get their demand side content into our network. I also helped manage a 24/7 DevOps team across our San Francisco, Beijing, and Berlin offices to keep our backend operating at scale for mobile game users around the world.

Castle.io offers a SaaS service to help web and mobile apps detect bot attacks and prevent account abuse. I joined during an early stage venture round in January 2019 to help promote the service by leading Developer Relations and helping build out the Solutions Engineering team. The engineers I led maintained SDKs for mobile, web, and even an edge based solution built on CloudFlare Workers. Among the many hats I wore in Castle’s early days was building their Soc 2 controls and responding to InfoSec questionnaires from enterprise clients. I stayed through tough times at the height of Covid until relocating to Washington DC mid 2021.