Xbox - Developer Experience
Building and maintaining developer tooling for game studios shipping on Xbox — retail-to-dev-kit support for Unity/Unreal (UWP), iteration-time telemetry dashboards across Visual Studio + Windows + Xbox tooling, standardized ETW instrumentation, and automated testing for remote debugging and OS/tooling integration pipelines.
At Xbox I worked on the Developer Experience team (DevX), responsible for the tooling game studios use to build, deploy, debug, and ship games on the console. That surface area spanned Xbox’s deployment and debugging stack, tight integration with the Windows operating system, and developer workflows tied into Visual Studio / the C++ build pipeline — coordinating across partner teams including graphics and platform engineering.
Retail-to-Dev-Kit ("Xbox One Dev Mode") Launch Support
I helped ship the Retail-to-Dev-Kit initiative (Xbox One Dev Mode): enabling any retail Xbox console to be converted into a development kit to meet demand from hobbyist and indie developers using engines like Unity and Unreal. My focus was end-to-end validation using a custom Unity game built specifically to exercise the offering — verifying conversion flows, SDK integration, deployment, and core runtime functionality (input, networking/Xbox Live integration, and graphics).
I reported bugs across core teams (notably around graphics, input, and Xbox Live integration), improved documentation, and ultimately demoed the full workflow to leadership using the custom game as a real proof point for the platform experience.
Because this workflow targeted Universal Windows Platform (UWP), I also provided structured feedback on build/compiler pipeline issues affecting Unity C# UWP applications — helping teams prioritize fixes for a then-new platform surface area that developers were actively adopting.
Developer Iteration-Time Dashboard (Build → Deploy → Run)
I worked on a developer iteration-time dashboard to identify where Xbox developer workflows were slow compared to competing consoles. The dashboard stitched together telemetry from DevX internal tools, Visual Studio, and Windows OS events to produce a structured timeline of the build-and-deploy critical path.
I collaborated with senior engineers to define the milestones that mattered, implemented and validated the timeline views, and used the resulting data to help teams understand bottlenecks and drive cross-team optimization work.
Telemetry Standardization (ETW)
To improve observability across DevX tooling, I helped push standardized telemetry practices across the codebase using Windows ETW events — making it easier to consistently measure performance, correlate events, and debug issues across a multi-stage developer pipeline.
Remote Debugging & Integration Test Automation
I contributed to automated testing for a remote debugging tool that attached to Xbox hardware and monitored runtime/system signals (including DLL load/linking behavior and diagnostic logs). The goal was to better diagnose production-only issues that were hard to reproduce locally, such as runtime linking failures and stability problems.
I also helped maintain and extend an integration testing suite used to qualify new Xbox OS builds and the associated DevX tooling. The suite validated that representative games built against the new stack could deploy, boot, and run correctly — catching regressions early before they impacted external studios.