Clayton Hunsinger
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Columbia, SC, United States
Toptal member since February 11, 2026
Clayton is a senior software engineer who's spent 7+ years neck-deep in distributed systems across AWS and Azure. He genuinely loves solving complex infrastructure problems—the kind where you're scaling C#/.NET and Java back ends to handle 40,000+ concurrent users, and everything just has to work. Clayton has built custom game servers, designed entire cloud infrastructures from scratch, and once created a configuration-driven library that let game designers build game logic without writing code.
Portfolio
Experience
- Programming - 8 years
- Unit Testing - 8 years
- C#.NET - 6 years
- Azure - 5 years
- Java - 4 years
- Terraform - 4 years
- Elasticsearch - 3 years
- Scala - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure
The most amazing...
...thing about designing any system or software is seeing positive reactions and receiving praise from them for making something they found useful.
Work Experience
Lead Server Engineer
Talofa Games
- Architected and developed a real-time multiplayer server system for the game Run Legends, which scaled to handle 40,000+ users on its debut with no significant issues.
- Developed an in-house project called Simmy, which empowered game designers to bring their ideas to life with minimal designer-to-engineer overhead, saving hundreds of hours of work for everyone involved.
- Handled synchronization of game logic between the client and server as well as deployment of that logic.
- Managed and maintained the company's private GitLab instance, CI/CD runners, and other related infrastructure. This saved the company thousands of dollars compared to the fees for using GitLab due to project file storage requirements.
- Created and maintained multiple CI/CD pipelines for building and deploying or releasing private NuGet packages, Unity client builds, server builds, and other types of content.
- Set up an advanced logging and metrics infrastructure to enable advanced monitoring of our players in our games using Azure Application Insights and Azure Data Explorer.
- Utilized our advanced logging and metrics infrastructure to create dashboards that visualized our game's metrics and made it easy for our CEO and producer to track them. Game designers could see visuals to track how their feature designs performed.
Software Engineer II
Cox Automotive
- Implemented advanced logging, log aggregation, and event tracing that was so advanced that we could often diagnose the actual cause of a failure in an external API before the owners of that API knew their systems were having problems.
- Tracked and fixed bugs across a deployment of more than a dozen cloud components, including microservices.
- Implemented and maintained automatic CI/CD pipelines and other custom Jenkins utility jobs, which helped us reduce our time-to-resolution for issues with legacy software owned by my team.
- Inherited a MySQL table being misused as a message queue, causing full outages during cleanup jobs. Built a load-aware batch-delete job that adapted to server load, then worked with a solutions architect to migrate to a proper event queue system.
- Implemented multiple business features, such as the "workbook" feature, which was a wish list that allowed the user to include additional notes about their selected vehicles.
- Developed a utility that generated Java byte code logic that would automatically build Elasticsearch queries based on the fields we set on a basic request object. This utility came with a small initialization cost, but zero runtime overhead.
- Solved "mysterious" issues with request timeouts in legacy applications, which were caused by intense GC pressure due to hundreds of string manipulation operations of massive query strings being done for every web request.
- Took on senior-level responsibilities, including authoring the full planning documents for a major epic covering new authentication integration, legacy data mapping translations, technical architecture, and a complete feature and task breakdown.
Junior Software Engineer
Bridge 2 Solutions
- Brought automated testing coverage up from less than 50% to 95% with multiple layers of testing and validations to ensure the automated tests were valid.
- Eliminated thousands of lines of boilerplate, entity, model, and validation logic by generating the code at compile-time with a custom utility that could be configured using attributes.
- Fixed major concurrency bugs during the development of a loyalty rewards program for a major credit card company that senior developers who drastically outranked me couldn't solve.
Experience
Blooberry Logic Engine
FEATURES
• Data persistence for all contexts
• Logic action system
• CMS for cataloged and uncatalogued content
• Player data, currency, and inventory system
• Addons
• Visual logic editors
• Observable dynamic logic values
• Event-based logic rule execution
The Blooberry Logic Engine consists of a "core" intended to run on any platform and runtime environment (eventually) and an "editor" package that helps create and manage the game's logic. To make the logic engine work with a specific game engine or environment, it will only be necessary to implement certain interfaces and write various compatibility shims to link the "core" and "editor" packages to the desired target environment.
Simmy
Simmy came with the features necessary to manage its own content, handle authentication of players, and handle data persistence using a multi-layered system. It also allows for code to be shared between client and server builds, and its layered structure makes it incredibly modular and adaptable.
J-Applicator
https://github.com/cshunsinger/J-ApplicatorMapping logic incurs a small overhead during bytecode generation and loading into the Java Virtual Machine, but has zero overhead when using the mapping logic, since no dynamic invocations via reflection are performed.
ASMSauce
https://github.com/cshunsinger/AsmSauceCoreThis library is used by Cox Automotive for an Elasticsearch query-building utility that translates a request model object into a full Elasticsearch query.
Metaprogramming with this library does incur a small one-time overhead during the initial generation of dynamic logic, but regular use of the generated logic comes with zero runtime overhead, as there is no need for dynamic invocation via "reflections."
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Kennesaw State University - Kennesaw, GA, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Node.js, React, Entity Framework, Twilio API, Akka Streams, Jenkins Pipeline
Tools
Terraform, GitLab, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Application Insights, Azure Data Explorer, ChatGPT, Apache Maven, Jenkins, Git, Gerrit, SonarQube, AWS ELB, Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk, Docker Compose, Gradle, ActiveMQ, GitLab Runner, GitLab CI/CD, Azure Logic Apps, Kafka Streams
Languages
Java, C#.NET, C#, SQL, Scala, JavaScript, Groovy, HTML, CSS, TypeScript, Kotlin, Python
Frameworks
.NET 8, .NET Core, .NET, Unity, Swagger, Core Foundation, Spring Boot, Windows PowerShell, Bootstrap, Android SDK
Paradigms
Unit Testing, Scalable Application, Database Design, Microservices, Event-driven Architecture, Metaprogramming
Platforms
Windows, Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Apache Kafka, Twilio, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda
Storage
NoSQL, Database Structure, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Datadog, Redis
Other
Programming, .NET Framework, API Integration, Software Architecture, High-performance Design, Architecture, Scalable Platforms, Scalable Architecture, RESTFul APIs, Data Modeling, Data Structures, APIs, Back-end Development, High Code Quality, Systems Design, CI/CD Pipelines, System Administration, Technical Support, Full-stack Development, AI Tools, Technical Leadership, Full-stack, Solution Architecture, Search Engines, Search Engine Development, Backend for Frontend BFF Pattern, Orchestration, Artificial Intelligence (AI), API Design, Mentorship, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Hardware, Compilers, Networking, Distributed Systems, AWS ECS Fargate, Serverless, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Flax Engine, AI Agents
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