Open to new opportunities

Hi, I'm Gabriel —
I turn complex specs into
shipped, playable software.

Senior Software Engineer working in C# and Unity on gameplay systems for a major social casino studio. I own features end to end — from design and math specs through animation, timing, audio, and polish — and I'm usually the one handed a half-finished story when a deadline moves or a teammate steps away.

Through 2026 I've been using Claude Code and GitHub Copilot as part of daily production game development.

01 — About

A bit about me

I build the systems that make a game feel like a game — the timing, the state machines, the moment where thirty animated elements have to fire in the right order and still let a player skip past them cleanly.

I've been writing software for 21 years, 20 of them in casino gaming. I started at IGT in product assurance, testing slot software and verifying math implementations — which turned out to be the best possible training for building it. In 2011 I moved onto game development there, shipping production slot titles in C# and Unity3D (and C++/LUA on QNX before that migration). Since 2021 I've been at SciPlay as a Senior Software Engineer.

The part of the job I'm best at is the messy middle. Specs disagree with each other, art lands late, someone goes on leave with a story half-written. I've made a habit of catching those early, escalating with a video and two options instead of a question, and keeping design, math, production, and QA pointed the same direction.

The web stack listed below — JavaScript, React, Node — is self-taught, picked up on my own time out of curiosity rather than on the job. I like understanding how the rest of the industry builds things.

Outside of work, I enjoy learning new topics, spending time with my dog Rosie, and visiting with friends and family. Rosie is an American Staffordshire Terrier and the most gentle dog I have ever encountered. Most of my free time goes toward picking up a new skill, and a lot of my catching up happens over video games with friends who aren't local.

Based in
Reno, Nevada
Focus
Gameplay Systems · C# · Unity3D
Experience
21 years in software
Shipped
25+ slot titles
Education
BS Computer Engineering, UC Santa Cruz
02 — Experience

Where I've been

  1. 2021 — Present

    Senior Software Engineer · SciPlay

    Gameplay features for social casino slot titles on a proprietary Unity engine. Feature ownership from design and math spec through animation, timing, audio, and release. Was on the pilot team that moved onto a new proprietary engine, feeding fixes back into the platform before the wider studio adopted it, and spent a period mentoring engineers on the team. Through 2026, using Claude Code and GitHub Copilot as part of daily development.

  2. 2020 — 2021

    Self-Directed Study · Full-Stack Web

    After a 2020 layoff during the gaming industry shutdown, I used the time to teach myself modern web development from scratch — JavaScript and React on the front end, Node.js with Express and PostgreSQL behind it. Built a full-stack image-recognition app against a third-party vision API, and a React single-page portfolio.

  3. 2011 — 2020

    Software Engineer, Game Development · IGT

    Production slot gaming software in C# and Unity3D, and rapid math proof-of-concept prototypes. Migrated from a C++/LUA on QNX stack. Worked daily with designers, mathematicians, sound engineers, artists, and technical artists.

  4. 2006 — 2011

    Software Engineer, Product Assurance · IGT

    Built C# and VBA test tooling that sped up the test team, verified math implementations on stepper and video slot software, and wrote client-facing documentation.

  5. 2005 — 2006

    Software Engineer · Vital Systems

    Built and maintained an in-house ERP system in VBA, MS Access, and SQL Server. Rebuilt the company website. Led and trained a team operating automated optical inspection for surface-mount PCB verification.

03 — Work

Selected work

2026 · AI-Assisted

Bringing AI tooling into slot development

Adopted Claude Code and GitHub Copilot into my daily workflow on a large proprietary Unity and C# codebase — feature scaffolding, code review, and working through unfamiliar systems faster. Spent the year refining prompt structure for a codebase with heavy internal convention, and working inside MCP-connected tooling and a local RAG index over internal documentation.

I was a user of those setups rather than the engineer who configured them. Standing up MCP servers and retrieval pipelines myself, and moving from assisted coding into agent workflows, is what I'm actively learning next.

Claude CodeGitHub CopilotLLM PromptingMCPRAG
Feature Owner

Hold & Spin Mega Feature

Owned a full Hold & Spin mega feature end to end — timing states, symbol interactions, and cross-system dependencies. Flagged it as a schedule risk during risk analysis and planned around it. Mid-build I found the design doc and the math table disagreeing about non-feature symbols, escalated the same day with a video repro, and proposed two implementation paths with trade-offs and timeline impact so the decision could move without stalling the sprint.

C#UnityGameplay Systems
Feature Build

A headline feature, start to finish

Built a headline feature from the ground up: 30+ coordinated animated elements, dynamic math tables, several overlapping animation states, clean skip handling, and synced audio and timing. Delivered a fully playable internal build plus a polished demo mode with hand-crafted save-state progressions for stakeholder review.

UnityAnimation StatesAudio Sync
Mid-flight Pickup

Taking over an in-progress title

Stepped into another engineer's work when he went on leave — in an unfamiliar codebase, with existing bugs, under deadline. Read the architecture, finished the planned feature story, and implemented a multi-step anticipation animation with symbol overlays, custom draw behavior, and frame-precise timing. Recognized by an Advanced Engineer for the turnaround.

The same pattern held on other loans: brought onto a second title mid-development to clear its backlog and helped it ship ahead of plan, and delivered two Hold & Spin sub-features on a cross-team assignment, finishing the first several days early so the second could start ahead of schedule.

C#Rapid OnboardingLegacy Code
IGT · Tooling

A prototype template that cut delivery 25%

Slot math proof-of-concepts were being rebuilt from scratch every time. I built a reusable C#/Unity3D starting template for prototypes, dropping time-to-delivery by 25% and giving designers and mathematicians a faster loop for testing ideas before committing to production.

C#Unity3DPrototyping

Shipped titles

25+ titles shipped across IGT and SciPlay, released in SciPlay's Jackpot Party and Gold Fish Casino. A few worth calling out:

Monster Jackpots — Frankenstein & Dracula

Two social adaptations of Monster Jackpots cabinet titles, each written from scratch in-house rather than adapted from existing code — reproducing an established game's math, pacing, and feel with no reference implementation to lean on, on two different engines.

Lyra's Lunar Loot

An original title built around a feature the studio hadn't shipped before. With no internal implementation to reference, I worked it out from the design and math specs directly — and delivered ahead of schedule.

Other work is proprietary, so it's described above by what it involved rather than by title. Happy to walk through any of it in detail — including the parts that went sideways.

04 — Toolkit

What I work with

Languages

  • C#
  • C++
  • SQL
  • JavaScript
  • LUA
  • PHP

Game Development

  • Unity3D
  • Animation state machines
  • Timing & sequencing
  • Audio sync
  • Slot math integration
  • Design patterns

Tools

  • JetBrains Rider
  • Visual Studio
  • Git & GitHub
  • Perforce
  • JIRA
  • Agile / Scrum

Practice

  • Feature ownership
  • Estimation & scoping
  • Code review
  • Cross-discipline collaboration
  • Mentoring

AI-Assisted Dev

  • Claude Code
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Prompt structure
  • MCP-connected tooling
  • Local RAG

Daily practitioner. Building these setups myself is next.

Self-taught

  • React
  • Node.js
  • HTML & CSS
  • PostgreSQL

Learned on my own time, outside of work. Refreshing currently.

05 — Contact

Let's build something
worth shipping.

I'm open to senior engineering roles — games, or software more broadly. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

Gabriel.Vasile.Software@gmail.com