Allen Gooch

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Principal Software Engineer,  Samba TV

May 2016 —  November 2025   10 years

Lead architect for the Internal Developer Platform and large-scale data processing applications in the real-time audience analytics space.

• Architected and led the Internal Developer Platform initiative, significantly reducing deployment times and standardizing governance across hybrid cloud and on-premise infrastructure.
• Managed global multi-account, multi-region AWS resources via Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Atlantis), enforcing immutable infrastructure patterns and reducing configuration drift.
• Designed high-throughput real-time analytics pipelines using Spark, Kafka, and Go/Python, scaling to process massive volumes of audience data.
• Spearheaded security compliance initiatives (ISO-27001), implementing Okta/OIDC SSO and participating in multiple successful external audits.

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CTO, Co-Founder,  SpaDash

September 2019 —  December 2023   4 years

Lead architect and developer for systems providing mobile haircut business systems.

• Developed development and production AWS infrastructure as declarative code
• Developed server systems used by mobile apps
• Developed continuous integration and delivery pipelines for all services
• Implemented continuous deployment in terms of GitOps Controllers in Kubernetes clusters
• Developed system design and implementation documentation, and runbooks for operations

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Senior Software Engineer,  BioWare / Electronic Arts

November 2007 —  March 2015   7 years

Software engineer responsible for server applications and infrastructure for 'Star Wars: The Old Republic', a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game.

• Engineered the critical migration of 'Star Wars: The Old Republic' server infrastructure from 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Linux, maximizing hardware utilization and service stability while minimizing operating costs.
• Built a real-time telemetry and querying ecosystem for game service diagnostics, essential for live-service operations and analytics.
• Developed automated systems for configuration, provisioning, and change management of large-scale game server infrastructure.

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Senior Software Engineer,  Midway Studios

June 2006 —  November 2007   a year

Lead software engineer responsible for online multiplayer for Xbox 360 and PS3 console game.

• Led the multiplayer engineering team in rapid prototyping with design and art disciplines to define core console multiplayer experiences for a cancelled and unreleased title.
• Managed engineering schedules and tasking, ensuring timely delivery of key milestones.
• Assisted 'Blacksite: Area 51' team with critical Xbox Live integrations and certification requirements (TCR/TRC).

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Senior Software Engineer,  Sony Computer Entertainment America

June 2005 —  April 2006   9 months

Lead network engineer responsible for online multiplayer game applications, infrastructure and development workflows.

• Led the multiplayer engineering team in rapid prototyping with design and art disciplines to define core console multiplayer experiences for a cancelled and unreleased title.
• Modernized legacy C codebases to modular C++, significantly increasing maintainability and feature velocity.
• Migrated development workflows from Visual Source Safe to Perforce, integrating JIRA for full requirements traceability.

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Senior Software Engineer,  Video Gaming Technologies

June 2004 —  April 2005   10 months

Lead network engineer responsible for casino network infrastructure and proprietary applications and middleware development.

• Designed and deployed a highly-available, self-healing casino service network, eliminating single points of failure.
• Developed a Ticket-In/Ticket-Out system for cashless casino gaming
• Established the division's engineering standards, including CI/CD pipelines, defect tracking, and configuration management.
• Developed a portable C++ component library enabling code reuse across heterogeneous platforms (Windows, Linux, MS-DOS).

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Software Engineer,  Electronic Arts

May 1997 —  December 2003   7 years

Server engineer responsible for online game applications, middleware and server infrastructure.

• Developed critical security infrastructure including user stream encryption and enhanced authorization systems for EA.com middleware.
• Developed 'The Sims Online' server systems and integrated with global Electronic Arts services.
• Built continuous integration tools in Python to automate builds and testing for C++ and Java applications and middleware.
• Developed game server systems for 'Air Warrior II', an online multiplayer World War II combat flight simulator.
• Designed and developed middleware platform providing C++ and Java APIs for MMOG applications.

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Music Theory and Composition (major), Computer Science (minor), Bachelor of Music (incomplete)

1989  —  1994   5 years

James Madison University