Samuel Haleem
Senior Staff EngineerEmail:sam.haleem@outlook.com
Phone:+1 310 555 0155
Location:Santa Monica, CA
GitHub:github.com/shaleem
Professional Summary
Staff engineer with 12 yrs building large-scale gaming backends serving 100M+ concurrent players. Architected matchmaking systems for 3 AAA titles. Known for clear communication, ownership, and shipping measurable outcomes. Combines strong software fundamentals with cross-functional collaboration and a bias for execution.Experience
Mar 2021Present
Senior Staff Engineer
Activision Blizzard · Santa Monica, CA
• Redesigned matchmaking for Call of Duty Warzone (140M MAU); cut average queue time 62%• Led migration from bare-metal to hybrid cloud (~$4M annual savings)
• Chair of Backend Architecture Council across 4 studios
• Improved CI cycle time from 23m to 13m
• Owned critical services at Activision Blizzard; improved p95 latency by 43%
Jul 2016Feb 2021
Principal Engineer
Riot Games · Los Angeles, CA
• Architected VALORANT ranked matchmaking supporting 15M ranked players• Built anti-cheat telemetry pipeline (10TB/day)
• Wrote design docs and RFCs adopted by 6 teams
• Improved CI cycle time from 34m to 12m
• Owned critical services at Riot Games; improved p95 latency by 34%
Skills
Go, Rust, C++, Kubernetes, gRPC, Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, DynamoDB, System Design, Distributed Systems, Game Networking, GDC TalksProjects
wg-matchmaker
Go
github.com/shaleem/wg-matchmaker
anticheat-telemetry
Rust, Kafka
cloud-migration-toolkit
Terraform, Go
Developer Experience Toolkit (Activision Blizzard)
TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL
• Documented learnings reused by peer teams
• Recognized in team/org review for execution quality
Education
B.S, Computer Science
USC
Los Angeles, CA
Summa cum laudeCertifications
AWS Solutions Architect Pro
GDC Speaker (3x)