James O'brien
Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames O'brien is a full-stack software engineer with 8 years of experience, currently building software at Microsoft in Redmond and fluent in React, TypeScript, and C#. He brings a backend and performance mindset to front-end problems, evidenced by open-source contributions to the Bevy game engine and the Rapier physics plugin—work that improved ECS ergonomics, rendering batching, and physics transform correctness. His background blends industry internships and tutoring with production engineering, so he pairs rigorous CS fundamentals from UNSW with practical shipping experience. Notably, he has helped optimize real-time systems in Rust for a popular game engine ecosystem, showing a willingness to cross language and domain boundaries to solve performance and correctness challenges.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
UNSW Sydney
Github Skills (16)
ec10
physics-engine10
bevy10
batch10
engine10
rust10
game-development10
entity-component-system10
batching10
game-engine10
performance-optimization10
game-dev10
webgpu9
uid8
front-end-development8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
bevyengine/bevy
Jun 2022 - Feb 2025
A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:165 reviews, 17 PRs, 208 comments in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the Bevy game engine's performance and functionality. Their contributions included adding a stress test using `TextureAtlas` to facilitate comparisons and optimizations. They also made significant improvements to ECS functionality by adding a `get_entity` method to `Commands` and by adding const methods and const defaults to `bevy_ui`. Furthermore, they were involved in refactoring the render sets to take advantage of new ordering, which improved batching.
data-drivenbevygamedevrustgame-development
dimforge/bevy_rapier
Aug 2022 - Aug 2022
Official Rapier plugin for the Bevy game engine.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 PR, 1 issue in 1 day
Contributions summary:James focused on improving the core logic of the `bevy_rapier` plugin, a physics engine integration for the Bevy game engine. Their work involved addressing issues with collider transformations, ensuring accurate spawn positions, and refining how transformations are propagated within the physics simulation. This included making transforms optional, and updating transform handling in the system.
bevyrustgame-developmentgame-enginerapier
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