Dylan Heyes

MahiGaming — Las Vegas, NV

Generative AI Platform

• Next-Generation AI Platform: Designed, built, and led a next-generation platform for building slot games with generative AI: bespoke tooling and workflows that keep designers and engineers in the loop, pairing custom-trained models with human review instead of fully automated, prompt-only generation.
• Custom Models & Infrastructure: Built custom training-data generation, model fine-tuning, and evaluation/integration tooling on Microsoft AI Foundry, wiring models directly into the authoring pipeline rather than relying on off-the-shelf APIs.

Platform & Delivery

• Platform & Engine: Architected the reusable, config-driven platform and engine behind 100% of the studio's games, used daily by both engineers and designers. Game-specific logic (gameplay, math, UI, features) is authored as runtime-interpreted node graphs rather than written by hand.
• Efficiency Gains: Shared a single runtime across every title, eliminating per-game engine rebuilds and substantially reducing the engineering, certification, and maintenance effort to ship and operate each new game.
• Extensibility & Reuse: Designed a plugin-driven, composable architecture for gameplay, math, UI, and features, extensible by any discipline and safely evolved across live titles.
• Visual Tooling: Built a Unity-like visual editor with runtime-interpreted node graphs, enabling real-time iteration, hot reload, and live desktop/mobile previews for engineers, designers, QA, and marketing.
• Patented Innovation: Invented a deterministic, seed-based method for generating reel outcomes, granted as U.S. Patent 12,579,865 (assigned to MahiGaming).
• Scale & Reach: Scaled to over 100 live titles serving players across multiple U.S. and European regulated markets, processing 120M+ game rounds daily.
• Engineering Standards: Introduced unit and end-to-end testing, linting, and code review as team-wide engineering standards, building a testing framework into the platform and enforcing them through CI so quality became part of the day-to-day culture, and documented these processes to support the studio's ISO audits.
• CI/CD & Automation: Established studio-wide CI pipelines (~1 hour) enforcing quality, compliance, and release readiness.
• Full-Stack Systems: Designed and delivered multiple full-stack internal tools and services supporting development, operations, and leadership workflows using React, Node.js/NestJS, FastAPI, Apollo GraphQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.

Leadership & Culture

• Leadership & Scope: As the company's senior-most engineer, reporting directly to the CEO, held organization-wide technical ownership and led 20+ engineers across 4 North American studios after progressing from senior engineer to principal architect.
• Culture Transformation: Transformed a previously siloed and adversarial culture into a collaborative, ownership-driven organization through transparent technical processes and shared documentation.
• Knowledge Sharing: Created and hosted a weekly voluntary platform forum for 5+ years that brought together engineers, artists, designers, and QA, regularly attended by ~50% of the company, driving cross-discipline alignment and platform evolution.
• Mentorship & Growth: Led mentorship and talent development via formal quarterly reviews with SMART goals, direct coaching, and promotion advocacy (including outside engineering).
• Executive Partnership: Served as the primary technical partner to executive leadership, aligning business strategy, regulatory constraints, and long-term technical investment.

Independent R&D / Sabbatical

• Generative Game Math: Built a tool that designs slot-game math models using genetic algorithms, automatically evolving reel layouts and pay tables toward target volatility and return-to-player profiles.
• Full-Stack Platform: Designed and built a complete social-casino platform (frontend + backend) as a production-quality prototype, exercising end-to-end architecture from game client through services and data.

Gamesys — Las Vegas, NV

• Engine & Revenue: Built shared engine systems behind social-casino titles generating ~$5M in monthly revenue, and was a principal contributor to the studio's Flash → HTML5 engine transition.
• Live Operations: Operated in high-traffic, revenue-critical environments, collaborating across product, design, math, and QA.

Genesis Gaming — Las Vegas, NV

• Engine Architecture: Designed and built a casino game engine from scratch, establishing the core architecture and development patterns that standardized game creation across the studio.