Mark Mandel
Staff Developer Advocate, Games
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Mandel is a Staff Developer Advocate specializing in multiplayer game backends with 19 years of engineering and developer-relations experience, now leading games advocacy at Discord. He helped found and technically led Google Cloud’s games vertical, co-creating notable open-source projects Agones (game server orchestration on Kubernetes) and Quilkin (a UDP proxy for large-scale game deployments), and has a strong track record of driving customer launches and revenue through open-source-led solutions. Mark combines deep backend and networking expertise (gRPC, Kubernetes, UDP proxies) with practical DevOps and tooling experience from contributions to projects like Sharpmake. He excels at spotting gaps in developer communities and shipping pragmatic, widely-adopted solutions that bridge product, engineering, and sales. Based in San Francisco, he pairs hands-on implementation skills with long-standing industry relationships across studios and cloud vendors. An owner-founder at a prior consultancy, he also brings entrepreneurial instincts and mentoring experience to technical leadership.
19 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor Multimedia, Bachelor Multimedia at Monash University
English
Github Skills (27)
kubernetes10
docker10
c-language10
api-design10
makefile10
dockers10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
dotnet-core10
yaml10
rest-api10
logging10
rust10
cprogramming-language10
serde10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
googleforgames/agones
Oct 2017 - Jan 2023
Dedicated Game Server Hosting and Scaling for Multiplayer Games on Kubernetes
Role in this project:
Backend Engineer
Backend EngineerContributions:49 releases, 1986 reviews, 884 commits in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mark made significant contributions to the Agones project, primarily focused on implementing the core SDK server functionality, including API extension for player tracking with player connect/disconnect functionality, as well as adding metrics and health check capabilities for the backend game server. The contributions involved modifications to gRPC service definitions, the implementation of new gRPC service, and enhancements to the core code to support features like a reserve process with a configurable duration and also ensuring allocated pods stay up.
golanghostingagonesdedicated-game-serversgames
googleforgames/quilkin
Jan 2020 - Jan 2023
Quilkin is a non-transparent UDP proxy specifically designed for use with large scale multiplayer dedicated game server deployments, to ensure security, access control, telemetry data, metrics and more.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 releases, 411 reviews, 379 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Mark primarily contributed to the backend of the project, focusing on implementing configuration models, parsing, and logging functionality. They introduced and implemented serde_yaml for parsing configuration files and integrated JSON-structured logging with slog_json. Furthermore, the user established the foundation for the server functionality by developing a basic server struct and incorporating functionalities for binding to local ports and handling incoming packets, demonstrating a grasp of networking concepts.
proxyudp-proxydedicated-gameserversdedicatedtelemetry-data
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