Mauricio Hollando

Leads engineering organization at Pocket Gems, overseeing platform and product development to scale teams and delivery across mobile and live services.

Founded and scaled the Simulations team, architected a Unity-based simulation framework integrated with robot controllers via gRPC and multi-world, multi-physics simulation pipelines to accelerate ML and robotics development.

Led engineering team through a major refactor to productionize the VR platform, implemented multiplayer/social layers and grew the engineering team from 3 to 10+ engineers to support large live-event VR apps.

Collaborated to develop a comprehensive video game development course covering business, art, programming and design to support industry talent development in El Salvador.

Directed technical roadmap and led a team of 16 programmers to deliver mobile and VR titles for third parties, improving framework, processes, and studio engineering culture.

Established technical roadmap and architecture, managed 15+ engineers and 3 managers, and built a robust backend infrastructure supporting multiple game projects including World War Doh.

Directed the prototype department, led prototyping efforts for titles including Angry Birds Star Wars and Bad Piggies, and drove company-wide adoption of Unity technologies and internal framework design.

Joined as the first prototype team member and led development of Angry Birds Space, managing a team of 6 programmers and delivering live-ops support and core technologies reused across multiple titles.

Designed and implemented combat AI behaviors, extended Unreal Engine 3 cover systems, and created a behavior tree system used across combat scenarios.

Implemented an AI layer for the Crystal Space engine during Google Summer of Code, developing steering, navigation and pathfinding systems foundational for future behavior systems.

Completed studies in Software Engineering at Universidad Simón Bolívar between 2003 and 2017.