Steven Noonan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevennoonan/ steven@uplinklabs.net

Summary

Senior Systems and Graphics Engineer with 15+ years of experience across cloud infrastructure, game development, graphics driver optimization, and low-level performance tuning. Proven track record of solving hard technical problems, delivering cross-platform solutions, and leading foundational engineering efforts at top-tier organizations including Valve, Amazon, and GEICO. Equally comfortable writing bare-metal diagnostics or orchestrating complex cloud test systems.

Career Highlights

  • Architected Darwinia’s full engine modernization, launching on Steam & GOG with native support for Apple Silicon, Vulkan, modern OpenGL, and FSR.
  • Developed VAC and Steam Trust ML infrastructure, improving detection accuracy and overall player experience.
  • Co-built Mjollnir, AWS EC2's long-standing test infrastructure platform still used to qualify new hardware at scale.
  • Delivered multi-cloud image builder & test toolchain for GEICO, enabling reproducible OS images across AWS, Azure, and OpenStack.
  • Implemented NUMA-aware performance validation and CPUID accuracy testing for next-gen virtualization platforms.

Skills

  • Performance & Low‑Level Tuningx86 NUMA, vCPU/pCPU pinning, CPUID topology; memory‑bandwidth, I/O‑latency benchmarking (fio, clockperf); kernel & hypervisor scheduling; SIMD auto‑vectorization (AVX, AVX2, NEON)
  • Programming & ScriptingC, C++, Python, Bash
  • Graphics & GPUOpenGL / OpenGL ES, ANGLE, Vulkan; tile‑based & immediate‑mode renderer optimization; AMD FSR, MSAA/SSAA/SMAA/FXAA integration
  • Operating SystemsLinux (kernel‑level tuning, control‑plane), Windows, macOS; container basics (Docker, Kubernetes fundamentals)
  • Version Control & CollaborationGit (expert), Perforce (intermediate); code review & CI integration
  • Machine‑Learning InfraAnti‑cheat/anti‑fraud model development; data sanitization & survey pipelines; reCAPTCHA integration
  • DatabasesMySQL/MariaDB, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server
  • Cloud & VirtualizationAmazon EC2, Azure, OpenStack (Sunbeam/MicroStack), KVM, Xen
  • Test Automation & CI/CDCustom multi‑cloud VM‑image qualification frameworks; GitHub Actions; TCMS (Qase, TestRail); infrastructure‑as‑code validation; automated security‑hardening pipelines (CIS benchmarks, patch management)
  • OtherCross‑platform porting (Windows, Linux, macOS, Apple Silicon); security hardening & compliance; technical writing & spec drafting

Experience

GEICO December 2024 -- Present
Senior Staff Software Engineer, full-time position
  • Built a scalable, multi‑cloud test‑automation framework—covering AWS, Azure, and on‑prem OpenStack—to qualify base OS images, new hardware platforms, and virtualization environments
  • Defined and implemented platform‑qualification tests (NUMA topology, vCPU‑to‑pCPU pinning, CPUID reporting, memory‑bandwidth, CPU throughput, I/O latency) to surface misconfigurations before production rollout
  • Delivered a unified VM image builder that automatically generates hardened Linux images for all target clouds—reducing manual setup and drift across environments
  • Engineered a Linux VM–image security‑hardening toolchain (configuration audit, patch management, CIS benchmark enforcement) to ensure compliance with corporate and regulatory standards
Aviatrix February 2024 -- October 2024
Principal Software Engineer, full-time position
  • Improved stability and performance of customer-facing Terraform modules and infrastructure.
  • Developed new end-to-end testing infrastructure, with greater visibility and insight into: long-tail runs, distinct failure modes, cloud service provider reliability, product reliability, etc.
  • Designed and implemented new product release qualification procedures and requirements, focusing on customer experience, minimizing customer frustration.
  • Implemented new TCMS infrastructure using Qase (migrating from TestRail) for cost-saving and reliability reasons.
Samsung SARC/ACL March 2023 -- January 2024
Staff Software Engineer, full-time position
  • Developing Vulkan graphics drivers for the AMD-based GPU in Samsung phones.
  • Solved multiple conformance issues with Vulkan dEQP on the Samsung User Mode Driver (SUMD).
  • Implemented new features to better support ANGLE and improve rendering performance.
Valve Corporation August 2015 -- December 2022
Software Engineer, full-time position
  • Developed Valve Anti-Cheat and Steam Trust machine learning model and infrastructure. Implemented several new detection methods and heuristics for cheat and bot detection. These methods resulted in much higher and more accurate detections, improving the game experience for millions of daily users.
  • Low-level x86 Steam Datagram Relay (SDR) and game server I/O performance tuning and accompanying tooling, allowing for much more efficient use of hardware and consistent low-latency experience for users.
  • Cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS) software and game porting/development
  • Anti-fraud and anti-bot infrastructure to combat automated account creation, cheating, and other malicious activity. Worked with Google to improve reCAPTCHA and other anti-fraud tooling for Valve's use case.
  • Several improvements to the Steam Hardware Survey, improving data sanitization and gathering
  • Game Networking Sockets library development, maintenance and porting. The library provides developers with a good basis for multiplayer game networking, with support for the Steam Datagram Relay (SDR) infrastructure.
  • Steam Deck OS and Proton development and low-level x86 tuning/debugging, mostly on the Wine and kernel side. Improved compatibility and performance for many games across the board.
Introversion Software 2020 -- present
Developer, freelance development

Developed the "10000th Anniversary Edition" remaster of Darwinia. Rewrote the majority of the 2005-era game engine for performance and compatibility on modern hardware.

  • Redesigned and rewrote graphics subsystem to support OpenGL 3.3 core and OpenGL ES 3.0. Uses ANGLE to support multiple rendering backends: Vulkan, Direct3D, Metal, OpenGL. Introduced support for MSAA/SSAA/SMAA/FXAA for anti-aliasing, and AMD FSR 1.0 for scaling. Changes were implemented with a strong focus on performance and higher fidelity visuals.
    The original game engine only used the fixed-function OpenGL pipeline and had no support for any of the modern graphics tools like vertex buffers, framebuffer objects, vertex arrays, or shaders.
  • Rewrote custom UI toolkit to use dynamic DPI scaling to better support high DPI displays.
  • Rewrote sound engine to use MiniAudio for spatialized multithreaded high-performance cross-platform game audio. Supports up to 7.1-channel surround sound. The original engine only supported spatialization on Windows with DirectSound, and only supported up to 2-channel (stereo) audio.
  • Improved platform portability, introducing support for 64-bit CPU architectures, native Apple Silicon support, and optimizations for other tile-based renderers.
  • Significantly improved game performance through rendering, game math, and core design optimizations.
  • Fixed numerous long-standing gameplay, graphics and audio bugs.
  • Worked with numerous graphics hardware/driver vendors to solve bugs discovered in their driver implementations (AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm).
  • Contributed to the MiniAudio, ANGLE, and SDL projects to solve bugs or add new features.
  • Providing long-term game updates on Steam and Good Old Games (GOG) with support for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Amazon Web Services - EC2 Kernel and Operating Systems Team January 2012 -- August 2015
Software Engineer, full-time position

Linux kernel engineer, software engineer, and performance guru.

  • Development focus on several key areas while with Amazon EC2: block I/O performance, network throughput/latency, hypervisor scheduling and resource allocation, scalable fleet validation and testing instrastructure, and new platform development.
  • Primary platform team engineer responsible for multiple platforms:

    • High-capacity HDD-based High Storage (HS1) platform (hs1.8xlarge). Aside from base platform development, implemented generally applicable core platform tooling for resource affinity to ensure high throughput.
    • First SSD-based High I/O (HI1) platform (hi1.4xlarge). Aside from base platform development, implemented several kernel, hypervisor, and userspace changes to ensure high I/O per second (IOPS) rate.
  • Developed critical tooling for platform performance and development:

    • Wrote declarative tools/services for fair resource management on all EC2 instance types (PID affinity, IRQ affinity, vCPU/pCPU pinning, CPUID topology).
    • Co-author of a fast, scalable, and reliable tool infrastructure (internally called "Mjollnir") used for platform qualification, benchmarking, testing, and emergent operational use cases. To this day, Mjollnir still enables engineers to rapidly prototype and qualify platforms for the Amazon EC2 fleet.
Amazon Web Services - EC2 High Performance Computing (HPC) Team January 2011 -- January 2012
Software Engineer, full-time position
Introversion Software 2005 -- 2007
Linux and Mac Developer, contract work
  • Developed the Linux port of Defcon, using C++, SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer and OpenGL.
  • Assisted in the development of the Windows Vista version of Darwinia, which was released on MSN Games shortly after Windows Vista's release.
Exosyphen Studios 2009 -- 2010
Linux and Mac Developer, contract work
  • Developed the Linux and macOS ports of Hacker Evolution: Untold. Was tasked with eliminating the use of DirectX and Windows-specific APIs, and refactored the code to use much more cross-platform APIs including SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and OpenGL. The project is written in pure C++.

Open Source

  • GameNetworkingSockets, a game networking library
    Ported to foreign (non-x86 and Big Endian) architectures, including several endianness correctness fixes. Developed and maintained build system and continuous integration, complete with ASAN/UBSAN tests and related fixes.
  • N-Body, a portable N-Body benchmark with support for CUDA, SIMD, and auto-vectorization
    Initially forked from the CUDA Handbook repository. Implemented a build infrastructure using GNU make (and later Meson + ninja). Implemented option to build without CUDA support (i.e. only CPU implementations). Vastly improved the CPU implementations to better support auto-vectorization with GCC and Clang -- with these changes, the compiler generates better code than the SIMD intrinsic versions and even takes advantage of newer instruction sets not implemented with intrinsics (e.g. AVX, AVX2, NEON, etc). Added OpenMP support in all CPU implementations. Implemented tiled CPU SOA algorithm. Numerous bugfixes over upstream as well.
  • CPUID
    Wrote a command-line utility for dumping/decoding information gathered with the x86 CPUID instruction.
  • clockperf
    Wrote a series of tests to identify platform performance or correctness problems with regards to timekeeping.
  • fio, flexible disk/network I/O tester
    Numerous contributions, most of which were a direct result of work at Amazon Web Services.

Education

Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA, USA Winter 2007 -- Winter 2009
Student of Computer Engineering
Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA Fall 2006, Spring 2009 -- Fall 2010
Student of Computer Science

Other Experience and Qualifications

Scouting
  • Achieved rank of Eagle Scout in 2001.
  • Vigil Honor in Order of the Arrow.
  • Was active in cub scouts, achieved all ranks (Bobcat, Wolf, Bear, Webelos).