Drew PotterStaff Engineer · AI Systems · Cloud Infrastructure · Full-Stack

Gotendai

Staff Engineer2025 – Present

• Collaborated directly with founders to translate product vision into technical architecture and shipped features end-to-end across a full-stack AI-powered mobile game platform
• Designed and owned the full cloud infrastructure (IaC, containerized deploys, database architecture, CDN, secrets management) with automated CI/CD pipelines for staging and production environments
• Architected a real-time AI character conversation system spanning the game client and backend API, covering LLM integration, streaming speech-to-text, text-to-speech with phoneme sync, and content moderation
• Built and maintained the game backend including player authentication, in-app purchase validation, an LLM-driven memory and scoring system for character relationships, and a Unity Cloud integration layer
• Architected the Unity mobile game client using a service-oriented, platform-abstract pattern separating gameplay logic from platform-specific concerns (audio, auth, purchases, permissions)
• Owned the in-game economy end-to-end, from client-side UI and purchase flows to an authoritative backend that validated transactions and managed player inventory, energy, and progression server-side
• Built a dynamic AI configuration system allowing founders to tune character personalities, prompts, and emotion behaviors through an admin UI and push updates without code deploys or app store releases
• Designed a provider-agnostic abstraction layer for all AI speech and language services, enabling the team to evaluate, swap, or add vendors without changes to game or backend logic, a decision that paid off as the product iterated through multiple providers

Anima Virtuality

Staff Engineer2021 – 2024

• Served as founding engineer, owning all software development at Anima while collaborating directly with founders to define the product roadmap and technical strategy at every stage
• Designed, implemented, and operated all cloud infrastructure end-to-end (containers, functions, load balancers, and databases) with repeatable IaC and automated CI/CD pipelines across all projects
• Wrote and deployed smart contracts for Anima NFTs, and built the marketplace enabling customers to purchase with either fiat or cryptocurrency
• Built the backend for the Mirror iOS app, enabling players to view their NFTs in AR and evolve them at real-world locations
• Designed and developed Onlybots end-to-end (website, API, and iOS app), delivering AI-powered virtual robot companions with conversational capabilities

Cox Automotive (Dealer.com)

Software Engineer → Lead Software Engineer2013 – 2021

• Pioneered a microservice deployment pattern on ECS with blue/green deployments and CI/CD pipeline
• Designed, delivered, and operated highly available and high-throughput REST services in AWS from the ground up
• Built a distributed, stateless, single-page application authentication system with drop-in libraries based on JWT/JWKs
• Created patterns for writing and managing Terraform projects in a secure, DRY, and deterministic way
• Mentored and supported other developers as a subject-matter expert on AWS, DevOps, and software development best practices

Skills