| Software Engineer | Gameplay, Animation & AI Systems | Mid Web-Dev |

Juan Becerra

Juan Becerra is a software engineer with 5+ years of AAA game development experience building gameplay, animation, tools, and AI systems at Electronic Arts. His production tools have helped ship games and been adopted across multiple studios to speed up content creation, and lately he's been building at the intersection of game dev and AI: a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) prototype for finding animations by style, mood, and posture, and ProtoBoy, an MCP server that grounds AI coding agents in a game's design docs. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Boise State University and is taking graduate coursework in machine learning and deep learning at the University of Washington. He is based in Seattle, WA and is open to remote, on-site, or hybrid roles in AI engineering, game development, and software engineering.

Outside of work, Juan is a gigging musician for several local and touring bands. He enjoys doing session work for recording artists and playing live shows, and has experience in music production. That probably won't help much on the job, but please consider this when looking for a personality hire.

Resume (PDF) View Portfolio →

Experience

Electronic Arts - Lifestyle

Software Engineer (Tools and Tech-Art) · Kirkland, WA

2025 – Present
Architected a project-agnostic Maya/Python animation stylization tool with modular PySide/Qt UIs that uses existing animation databases to generate content for new projects. It's been adopted across multiple EA studios and cuts manual keyframing by over 70%. Engineered a high-throughput Unreal Engine C++ plugin that exports runtime character trajectory, pose, and velocity data to populate motion-matching animation databases. Prototyped a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system that retrieves animations by characteristics such as style, mood, and posture, using machine learning for automated asset tagging.

Electronic Arts - Maxis Studios

Software Engineer (Gameplay and Animation) · Seattle, WA (Remote)

2021 – 2025
Worked on the pre-production of Project Rene, an upcoming Sims experience built in Unreal Engine 5. Architected a multithreaded asynchronous path-planning and navigation API in C++, enabling deterministic path following in multiplayer with real-time obstacle avoidance, held under a 1.5ms frame budget. Implemented locomotion and animation runtime systems, including motion matching, distance matching, custom inverse kinematics (IK), and animation event systems. Built in-editor tuning tools and visual debuggers for behavior trees and animation, used by designers and animators. Profiled memory, compute, and frame budgets for dense crowd and multiplayer simulation, eliminating hitches in character evaluation graphs and spatial query sweeps.

Lionbridge

Senior Games Test Engineer · Boise, ID

2020 – 2021
Led a QA team testing live-service multiplayer AAA titles, writing engine-level bug diagnostics in JIRA and drawing on engine and gameplay programming knowledge to add insight to existing reports.

Skills

Programming Languages

C++ C C# Python Rust Java JavaScript TypeScript Lua SQL Bash PowerShell

AI & Machine Learning

LLMs AI Agents Model Context Protocol (MCP) RAG Prompt Engineering PyTorch GenAI / ML Content Tools ML Asset Tagging Classical AI & Search

Game Engines

Unreal Engine 5 (Source) Unity Godot

Gameplay & Animation

Locomotion Character Physics Motion Matching Distance Matching Custom IK Navigation / Pathfinding Crowd Simulation State Machines Behavior Trees Game AI Collision Detection Physics Integrators Constraint Solvers

Graphics Programming

Vulkan Direct3D OpenGL WebGL Three.js GLSL/HLSL ShaderLab / Cg CUDA / Compute Shaders Procedural Generation

Engine & Systems

Multi-threading Async API Design Entity-Component Systems Data-Oriented Design Memory Management Custom Engine Development Profiling Frame-Budget Engineering Valgrind

Tools & Pipelines

Maya API PySide / Qt ImGui Unreal Plugin Development In-Editor Tooling Visual Debuggers DCC Pipeline Automation Animation Data Pipelines

Game Development Tools

Maya Blender 3ds Max Cascadeur Wwise FMOD

AI-Assisted Development

Claude Code Gemini Cursor Codex Agent Skills Context Engineering Agentic Workflows Multi-Agent Systems Agent Harnesses Agent Evaluation

Web, Mobile & Data

React Native Express.js REST APIs Flask Android Vite Web Audio API SQL Server MySQL PostgreSQL

Build & Infrastructure

Git / GitHub / GitLab Perforce CMake Visual Studio CI/CD GitHub Actions Jenkins Docker AWS Google Cloud Linux

Process & Collaboration

JIRA Confluence Trello Agile / Scrum Code & Design Reviews Unit Testing QA Methods Technical Roadmaps Team Leadership Mentoring

Spoken Languages

English (Native) Spanish (Professional)

Music Performance

~1/3 Bachelor of Music Bass Guitar Session Musician Cracked Copy of Ableton

Personality Hire

Sense of humor that can't be replicated with 1,000 data centers.

Education

University of Washington - Continuing Education

Graduate Coursework in Machine Learning & Deep Learning (Non-Degree, In Progress) · Seattle, WA
2026 – Present
  • Introduction to Machine Learning
  • Advanced Machine Learning
  • Deep Learning

Boise State University

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science · Boise, ID
2017 – 2021
  • Data Structures
  • Algorithms
  • Version Control and Agile Development
  • Computer Graphics (Graduate)
  • Artificial Intelligence (Graduate)
  • Parallel Computing (Graduate)
  • Object-Oriented Design Patterns (Graduate)
  • 2D/3D Game Development
  • Mobile Development
  • Web Development
  • Linear Algebra
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