My time at Epic Games has come to an end. It was brief but I learned a lot, I got to dust off some long unused skills (management) and got to work with some great people. Unfortunately the pandemic prevented me from spending time at Epic Games HQ or meeting many Epic employees in person but I'm sure the practice I got with remote work (and management) will come in handy!
I joined Epic Games as a Principal Engineer on the Fortnite anti-cheat team but soon moved over to a Tech Director role to take over management responsibilities for the anti-cheat team and the related Gameplay Integrity team. This position had me looking after the anti-cheat technology for Epic Games (primarily for Fortnite) as well as being responsible for the competitive integrity of Fortnite in general (specifically Fortnite competitive events).
Beside management duties I also found some time for technical work but unlike previously almost all of my technical accomplishments were invisible to players. Over the course of the year I worked on technology for Fortnite all over the stack, including tech in the game client, game server, build systems, analytics pipeline, services infrastructure and operations tooling. This tech was usually anti-cheat or security related but occasionally I'd work on other areas such as performance or reliability issues.
The one exception to the behind the scenes nature of my work was the occasional feature or bug fixes for Unreal Engine. In particular in UE4.27 some of my work is mentioned in the release notes (and more of my changes can probably be found in the semi-public Github or Perforce logs). It was definitely a privilege to contribute (in a small way) to a game engine that I've spent so many years working with!
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Two examples of my engine changes from the release notes
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Next up after Epic I plan to be more of a generalist and spend less of my time on anti-cheat issues. The form it'll take is still up in the air but when I have something to announce I'll try and remember to post it here!
