Mike Balfour
Sr Software Engineer, Amazon Location Service
Georgetown, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Balfour is a seasoned software leader with over 25 years of experience building high-performance interactive real-time 3D simulations and consumer games, now applying that expertise as a Senior Software Engineer on Amazon Location Service. He has driven technical direction for multiple AAA titles totaling over $1B in revenue, architected systems that scale to 1M+ DAU and 500M+ transactions per day, and led and mentored engineering organizations of 30+ people. A consummate generalist, Mike moves easily between hands-on C++ engine work—evidenced by his contributions to the Open 3D Engine terrain system—and strategic cloud services at AWS. He combines metrics-driven delivery with pragmatic engineering, thriving on refactoring complex systems, improving testability, and shipping maintainable, scalable solutions. Based in Georgetown, Texas, he brings both deep domain knowledge in real-time graphics and a proven track record of translating game-industry rigor into robust cloud-scale services.
5 years of coding experience
29 years of employment as a software developer
Case Western Reserve University
Github Skills (11)
c-language10
3d-graphics10
cprogramming-language10
game-engine10
game-development9
unit-testing9
debug8
debugging8
architecture8
architectures8
git7
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
o3de/o3de
Apr 2021 - Jan 2023
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.
Role in this project:
Backend Engineer
Backend EngineerContributions:1187 reviews, 337 commits, 498 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Mike's contributions focused on the cleanup and development of the terrain system, primarily by refactoring and fixing bugs. The work included removing platform-specific traits to improve unit test compatibility, implementing normal calculations, and fixing order-of-operation errors. The user also added testing functionality to verify core components within the terrain system. The user's changes involved modifying the C++ source files within the Gems/Terrain/Code/Source/TerrainSystem directory.
c-plus-plusmulti-platformcommercialworldshalo
aws-geospatial/amazon-location-utilities-datatypes-js
Feb 2024 - Mar 2025
Utilities to translate geospatial data types used by Amazon Location from / to well-known geospatial data types such as GeoJSON.
Contributions:1 release, 19 reviews, 3 PRs in 1 year 1 month
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