Sander Mertens
Principal Engineer at Hypnos Entertainment, Inc.
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSander Mertens is a Principal Engineer based in San Francisco with 11 years of experience building game development, AR/VR, and real-time distributed systems. He is the author and primary maintainer of Flecs, a high-performance ECS for C/C++, and has a strong track record of contributing foundational features that enable modular, lifecycle-aware components. His career spans embedded middleware and DDS expertise at RTI and PrismTech to robotics and autonomy work at Zoox, giving him deep experience in low-latency, safety-critical systems. Now working with Meta on metaverse/VR projects at Hypnos Entertainment, he blends systems-level C/C++ engineering with practical product-focused solutions. Colleagues rely on him for clean, performant architecture that scales from device-level communications to game-engine tooling.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
High School Math / Biology / Physics / Chemistry, High School Math / Biology / Physics / Chemistry at Liemers College ZevenaarBachelor's Degree Computer science, Bachelor's Degree Computer science at HAN University of Applied Science
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
929reputation
1.4mreached
7answers
8questions
Github Skills (17)
ec10
c-language10
entity-component-system10
cprogramming-language10
software-design9
data-structures8
data-structure8
modularity8
api-design8
modular8
code-optimization7
macos6
dynamic-linking6
linkage6
language-agnostic6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
SanderMertens/flecs
Aug 2018 - Jan 2023
A fast entity component system (ECS) for C & C++
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:64 releases, 69 reviews, 3510 commits in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Sander's commits focused on adding functionality to the `flecs` codebase. Their contributions included adding an `elem` method to the `meta::cursor` class, which would allow for accessing specific elements in a collection. They also made changes that improved the ability to set component lifecycle hooks and added example code demonstrating how to create and import modules, which would allow developers to create modular ECS functionality. These changes show the user working on foundational parts of the system.
production-readyentityentity-frameworkentity-component-systemportable
flecs-hub/explorer
Sep 2021 - Feb 2023
Web-based UI for monitoring Flecs applications, trying out queries & learning ECS
Contributions:1 review, 228 commits, 29 PRs in 1 year 5 months
ecsweb-basedflecsawsmonitoring
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