Jay Severson
Founder at VexHex Games
San Jose, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJay Severson is a seasoned founder and software engineer with 15+ years building and scaling web and mobile game platforms from idea to acquisition. He co-founded and served as CTO of Chess.com, formalizing architecture, tech stack, and remote engineering practices to support massive traffic and growth, and later co-founded Exercise.com and several game studios. Jay blends hands-on backend expertise (PHP, MySQL, caching, scalable architectures) with product-first thinking, shipping consumer multiplayer experiences like Landover’s fast-turn Catan-style play. His background as a competitive pro gamer—winning the 1998 PGL Starcraft Championship and competing in Seoul—adds rare player-perspective to his product design and community-driven features. Based in San Jose, he thrives on founding teams, mentoring distributed engineers, and turning multiplayer game concepts into robust, high-volume services.
15 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
BYUComputer Science, Math Minor, Computer Science, Math Minor at San José State University
Github Skills (28)
elasticsearch-php10
fosuserbundle10
pear10
filter10
htmlpurifier10
elastica10
bundle9
symfony9
php9
twig9
mongodb9
odm9
elasticsearch8
html8
symfony-bundle8
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
nuttyputty/landover-localization
Nov 2023 - Apr 2024
Contributions:63 pushes in 5 months
ChessCom/Chess-Game
Feb 2012 - Jan 2016
Based on Pear Games_Chess - represents a chess game as a php object
Contributions:13 commits, 3 PRs, 7 pushes in 3 years 11 months
pearphpgames
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