Juan Pablo Chandias

Software development professional with comprehensive background in building scalable, high-quality software applications. Known for delivering impactful projects and driving continuous improvement. Team-oriented and results-driven, with strong ability to adapt to changing requirements and priorities. Proficient in programming languages and software development methodologies.

• Built Argentina’s largest game production at the time: Managed a team of 60+ people and a $4M budget to deliver Element: Space, co-founding Sixth Vowel and shaping the local industry through government partnerships and the launch of Inca Games, Latin America’s first game publisher.
• Directed Wildlife Studios’ Central Tech department: Led cross-team initiatives at a $3B company with 1000+ employees, implementing pipelines that improved asset production efficiency by up to 50%, and created the QA Reporting Tool that transformed bug reporting from hours to minutes.
• Delivered multiplayer for The Sandbox in under 3 months: Designed and implemented the entire online architecture (engine/editor split, headless server, AWS/Gamelift deployment, state machine flow) for an MMO metaverse that had zero multiplayer code three months before open alpha.
• Pioneered VR optimization with Gloomy Eyes: Built and directed the team that delivered an award-winning VR experience to Oculus Quest, overcoming extreme hardware limits (150k triangles, no dynamic lights). Delivered all three chapters on schedule, winning Best VR Film at Sundance and SXSW, and recognition as one of the best-looking Quest titles of its time.
• Launched an early independent studio (Motin Games): Co-founded and engineered ~15 Android games for industry clients, building a reusable production framework that later became the base of Sixth Vowel’s development platform.
• Proven rapid impact at Gameloft: Promoted to Senior Engineer in just 6 months, shipped multiple AAA mobile titles, and served as sole developer on The Oregon Trail (iPhone), which remained in the App Store Top 10 for a decade.
• Spearheaded backend innovation at Druids AI: As the sole backend engineer, designed and delivered the infrastructure powering Sage (an AI assistant for Unreal Engine), establishing n8n as the company’s core backend framework and building LLM-driven workflows from scratch.
• Cross-discipline leadership at Arrivant: Stepped up as Technical Director of Project Eluüne: Stargarden, an MMO focused on social play and Web3, leading a team of engineers, aligning tech vision with founders, and implementing core networking and voice systems.

SIXTH VOWEL S.A.

Sixth Vowel's Facebook 

Element Space Gameplay 

A few years ago, I was approached by Javier Entelman (CEO of Sixth Vowel) with a bold idea: instead of being yet another service studio for foreign companies, why not build original IPs and export them to the world? He wanted me to lead the engineering side of that vision. He was a little crazy, but so was I.

Together with the two founders, the art director, and the lead game designer, we built Sixth Vowel from scratch. Four years later, we released Element: Space — the largest game production in Argentina at the time — with a team that grew to over 60 people at peak. Along the way, we helped shape the local industry itself: the company was selected as the first government-backed Accelerator/Incubator for gaming by the Ministry of Production, and we co-founded Inca Games, the first Latin American publisher.

As Head of Engineering, my role spanned from hands-on prototyping to high-level production planning:

• Built the first prototypes of Element: Space, defining the core vision and technical direction.
• Designed and implemented the base framework and architecture of the game, including workflows and pipelines for animation, cinematics, music, modeling, and more.
• Recruited and led a 10-person engineering team, setting coding standards, reviewing work, and ensuring long-term scalability.
• Owned the production roadmap and all technical documentation, while also driving research and testing of new technologies.
• Defined the studio’s engineering philosophy and development standards, ensuring consistency across all disciplines.
• Coordinated closely with the art, design, and production leads to keep the game on track and aligned across departments.
• Acted as producer for the engineering area, managing progress tracking, task definition, and cross-team communication.
• Represented the development department in meetings with investors, government officials, and external partners.
  

Impact highlights:

• Built a game studio from the ground up, culminating in Argentina’s largest game production at the time.
• Released Element: Space, a tactical strategy game inspired by XCOM, with international distribution.
• Helped shape the Argentine game industry through education initiatives, government partnerships, and the founding of the first Latin American publisher.

MOTIN GAMES

After leaving Gameloft, two colleagues and I founded Motin Games, a small independent studio focused on mobile development. We worked as a freelance team that could take on full projects for industry clients. One of our biggest clients was CMD (Compañía de Medios Digitales), a subsidiary of Argentina’s largest media group, Clarín S.A.

During this period we shipped around 15 games for the earliest versions of Android, when the platform was still brand new. It was an exciting, scrappy phase where we had to move fast, solve problems creatively, and stretch a small team’s capacity as far as it could go.

As Head of Engineering (and the only engineer) I was responsible for:

• Developing a custom framework that streamlined our game production pipeline, maximizing efficiency with limited resources. (This framework later became a cornerstone of Sixth Vowel’s development platform.)
• Implementing all engineering and technical solutions for our projects.
• Working directly with clients to define requirements, propose production plans, and ensure timely delivery.
• Handling budgets, contracts, and client negotiations, alongside my co-founders.
• Managing company operations as the legal representative of Motin Games, including bookkeeping and taxes.
  

Impact highlights:

• Co-founded and built one of Argentina’s early independent mobile studios.
• Delivered ~15 Android games in partnership with industry clients.
• Built a reusable framework that boosted productivity and influenced future game development platforms.
• Balanced roles as both lead engineer and co-founder, driving both the technical and business sides of the company.

WILDLIFE STUDIOS 

Wildlife Website 

I joined Wildlife to be part of the newly formed Central Tech (DevTech) team, a small group of senior developers tasked with solving big-picture problems across the company’s four main titles at the time (Zooba, Tennis Clash, Sniper 3D, War Machines). I was originally brought in as a Senior Engineer by Wildlife’s Head of Engineering—who had been considering me for a studio lead position in Buenos Aires before the pandemic put those plans on hold. A year later, he personally invited me to join the DevTech initiative.  

The mission of the team was clear: unify the architecture and production processes across all game teams, boost productivity for developers of every discipline, and tackle technical challenges without the pressure of live-game deadlines. My first steps were to analyze each game’s pipelines, identify bottlenecks, and build tools and workflows to make production smoother and faster.  

After a few months, when my original boss left the company, I stepped up as Area Director. 

In this role I:

• Led a team of two highly experienced engineers, focusing on cross-game technical solutions.
• Coordinated directly with technical directors, art leads, music leads, and other discipline heads across all projects.
• Guided the implementation of new pipelines and tools that improved asset production efficiency—sometimes by as much as 50%.
• Oversaw the development of a character creation pipeline for Tennis Clash that cut production time in half.
• Designed and built the QA Reporting Tool — an in-game overlay that let testers submit Jira bug reports directly from within the game, complete with logs, system stats, and a screenshot. What once took hours now took minutes. Because it was fully configurable without engineering support, it empowered QA teams, dramatically sped up testing, and made it possible to capture rare, non-reproducible bugs. I built the first version in just a week, and it quickly became a company-wide staple.

Unfortunately, after about a year Wildlife reorganized its strategy, stopped developing new games internally, and shifted toward publishing with external studios. This meant the Central Tech team was disbanded. I was offered the opportunity to stay on in any position I wanted, but I chose to move on—since the reasons that drew me to Wildlife in the first place were no longer there.

THE SANDBOX  

The Sandbox website 

The Sandbox is a blockchain-powered MMO/metaverse where players can create, own, and monetize their own “Lands.” When I was brought in by the Head of Engineering, the game was three months away from its open alpha launch — and it didn’t have a single line of multiplayer code. My mission: design and deliver the online multiplayer architecture from scratch.

The challenge was big: the project had been built as a single-player game with an editor bolted on top, and the gameplay logic was completely entangled with UI/editor code. My first step was to audit the codebase and produce a refactor plan that would even make multiplayer *possible*. That plan included: 

• Splitting the game engine from the editor application, which cleaned up responsibilities and let the France-based editor team and our in-house gameplay team work in parallel.
• Building a headless server version of the game by fully separating rendering from game logic.
• Designing and deploying the server infrastructure on AWS + Gamelift, with automated deployment and scaling.
• Implementing a state machine architecture to manage game/application flow, allowing us to easily add new states (like “connecting to server”) and clean out a host of old bugs in the process.

This plan worked — and we shipped the open alpha with functional multiplayer in place. But that was just phase one. Over the following year, I laid down the foundations of a robust online architecture that could support new features while scaling into the future.

As the project grew, I also stepped up into the de facto Technical Director role. The official director at the time focused more on rendering technology, so I took charge of team management and overall game planning. I led a team of six engineers, designed the development roadmaps, and coordinated cross-discipline efforts to keep multiplayer development aligned with the larger creative vision.  

Impact highlights:  

• Delivered multiplayer support for open alpha in under three months.
• Built the architectural separation (engine/editor, render/logic) that made online play and scalable server hosting possible.
• Designed the long-term multiplayer roadmap and server infrastructure, setting the stage for The Sandbox’s ongoing evolution as a live MMO.
• Led a team of six developers, effectively guiding technical direction for the whole project.

3DAR

3dar website 

Gloomy Eyes

3DAR is an animation powerhouse known for ads, music videos, and films—but when they decided to bring the award-winning VR movie Gloomy Eyes to the Oculus Quest, they had never built a real-time application before. I was hired to lead that effort, building the team and the pipelines that would make it possible.

I assembled a small core team (one programmer, one Maya animator, and one technical animator) dedicated full-time to the project, while also directing a group of six animators who were shared with other productions. Beyond just managing the port, I also mentored the company in real-time production practices—introducing source control, QA testing, and optimized pipelines for VR development.

The challenge was massive. Gloomy Eyes was designed for PC VR, with assets crafted as if for pre-rendered animation: multi-million triangle scenes, 4K textures everywhere, and heavy reliance on dynamic lighting (up to 24 lights per scene). The Oculus Quest, by contrast, capped at 150k triangles per frame, limited memory, and officially supported no dynamic lights at all.

To make it work, I:

• Redesigned the production process by analyzing every scene frame-by-frame, creating strict rules for how assets and animations had to be produced to fit Quest’s limitations.
• Built automated pipelines for polygon and texture optimization, balancing visual fidelity against performance.
• Created a new set of custom shaders tuned for Quest hardware.
• Developed a Maya-to-Unity export plugin, letting artists export assets directly without engineering help. This cut turnaround time by 70%, since artists could instantly test their work in-engine.
• Performed deep render-level optimization using RenderDoc, fine-tuning every draw call.

The result: we delivered all three chapters of Gloomy Eyes on schedule, with visual quality far beyond what was thought possible on the Quest. We even pulled off support for up to four dynamic lights, something the Oculus documentation flatly claimed was impossible. The port was recognized as one of the best-looking VR apps on the Quest—and the project went on to win awards, including Best VR Film at Sundance and SXSW, and recognition for its Quest version as one of the best-looking VR games on the platform.

Impact highlights:

• Built and led a cross-disciplinary team from scratch.
• Introduced real-time dev practices (source control, QA, pipelines) into a company that had never shipped interactive software.
• Delivered an award-winning Quest port that became a technical benchmark for VR at the time.

ARRIVANT

Project Eluüne 

Arrivant is a startup created to bring to life the beautiful world of Project Eluüne: Stargarden—an MMO centered on social play, cooperation, and community ownership through Web3 elements.  

I first joined the small engineering team as a senior engineer, brought in by the head of engineering (whom I’d worked with before). I was originally a technical backbone on the gameplay and online systems side, while also stepping in to guide the team whenever he was away. Six months later, when he left the company, I stepped up as Technical Director.  

In that role, I led a team of two engineers, coordinated closely with the founders, and worked side-by-side with design, art, and production to keep the vision moving forward. My mix of responsibilities looked something like this:

• Designed and implemented the base game architecture, built with scalability and networking in mind.
• Integrated Unreal’s Online replication into the architecture, creating player-facing examples of network interactions.
• Brought in Vivox for in-game voice and chat.
• Directed the engineering team, providing guidance, reviews, and technical strategy.
• Acted as the bridge between engineering and the rest of the studio, ensuring the technical vision stayed aligned with creative and business goals.

DRUIDS AI
Druids website 

Druids AI is a startup founded by veteran game developer Jesse Helton, focused on building AI-powered tools for Unreal Engine. The flagship project is Sage, an AI assistant designed to integrate directly into Unreal’s workflow.

I was brought in as the only engineer besides Jesse himself, responsible for designing and building the backend that powers Sage. This meant not just implementing, but also researching, testing, and choosing the technologies that would shape the company’s foundation. After experimenting with multiple options, I led the decision to base the backend on n8n, which proved to be the best fit for flexibility, speed, and integration with our needs.

In this role I:

• Designed and implemented the backend architecture, including REST APIs, database schemas, and authentication layers.
• Built the AI agent workflows that connect LLMs with tools and orchestration patterns.
• Created prototypes and proofs of concept for new features to guide product direction.
• Set up analytics, unit tests, and stress tests to ensure reliability and scalability.
• Managed backend deployment and live operations, including production rollouts.
• Owned my own work: planning, estimation, and delivery in sync with company goals.
  

Impact highlights:

• Acted as the sole backend engineer for Druids AI, working directly with the founder to build the product from the ground up.
• Established n8n as the core backend framework, after evaluating and testing multiple alternatives.
• Delivered the backend infrastructure that powers Sage, enabling AI-assisted workflows for Unreal Engine developers.

GAMELOFT

Gameloft website 

Gameloft is one of the largest mobile game companies in the world, and it’s where I grew into a Senior Engineer and learned the ropes of large-scale game production. As part of the Creations Team, I worked on multiple new products in parallel, jumping into whatever project needed extra firepower. At any given time, we’d have up to four games in production, and I had to be ready to pick up features, fix critical issues, or design systems from scratch.

In this role I:

• Developed gameplay systems and core architecture for multiple titles.
• Served as the sole developer on some projects, handling everything end-to-end.
• Contributed to multiplayer development on high-profile titles.
• Optimized games to run across a wide range of mobile devices, balancing performance with quality.
• Debugged complex issues and modernized legacy codebases, improving stability and maintainability.
• Self-managed my work through estimation, task breakdown, and progress tracking (Scrum).
  

Some of the titles I contributed to include:

• The Oregon Trail (2009) (solo developer) gameplay
• Brain Challenge (2007) (solo developer) gameplay
• Siberian Strike (2008) gameplay
• HAWX (2009) (multiplayer developer) gameplay
• N.O.V.A (2010). gameplay

 …and many more.

Impact highlights:

• Established myself as a Senior Engineer by delivering across a wide range of projects, from casual to AAA mobile.
• Shipped multiple successful titles, including both solo-developed projects and contributions to flagship franchises.
• Built the foundation of my experience in mobile game production, from fast prototyping to large-scale release.