Chetan Surpur, Developer in San Jose, CA, United States
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Chetan Surpur

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Game Development Developer

Location
San Jose, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
October 7, 2019

Chetan is an entrepreneur with nearly a decade of professional experience in software engineering. He has founded a mobile gaming company and released two games, one of which has over 6 million downloads on iOS and Android. Chetan was previously an engineer and researcher at a cutting-edge AI company, and the first engineering hire at a social mobile startup. He can fit easily into any project, delivering products that surprise and delight.

Portfolio

HIGHKEY Games
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud, Firebase, C#, Unity
Numenta
Plotly, JavaScript, Python
Yoga Bharati
Vuexfire, Firebase, Vuetify, Vue, JavaScript

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), MacOS

The most amazing...

...thing I've created from scratch is a generative music engine that creates entire songs in real-time and blends them together in an endless mix.

Work Experience

Founder

2016 - PRESENT
HIGHKEY Games
  • Grew team size to four members.
  • Designed, developed, and released two games (Orbit – playwithorbit.com, and Sound Sky – playsoundsky.com).
  • Grew Orbit to 6 million installs while maintaining a 4.6-star average rating on iOS and Android.
  • Charted to #4 in Top Free Puzzle Games on Google Play with Orbit.
  • Redesigned Orbit around in-game level creator to triple IAP revenue.
  • Redesigned Orbit levels and level progression to triple retention.
  • Integrated ad meditation in Orbit to double ad revenue.
  • Architected and implemented a stateless backend using AWS for Orbit to support 9,000 user-created levels played by 500,000 active users.
  • Created in Sound Sky a generative music engine that creates entire songs in real-time and blends them together in an endless mix.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud, Firebase, C#, Unity

Technical Consultant

2019 - 2019
Numenta
  • Created a platform for visualizing deep neural networks (https://github.com/chetan51/cerebro3).
  • Created a Python module that can patch any Pytorch module to save neural network weights during training as a series of images.
  • Created a JavaScript package that can import saved weights from the Python module and visualize them as an animating heatmap.
Technologies: Plotly, JavaScript, Python

Technical Consultant

2019 - 2019
Yoga Bharati
  • Designed, developed, and released a progressive web app (Yoga Habit) using Vue.js and Firebase.
  • Ran Yoga Habit for hundreds of users in a yoga marathon event.
  • Iterated on Yoga Habit app based on user feedback and analytics data to improve retention.
Technologies: Vuexfire, Firebase, Vuetify, Vue, JavaScript

Senior Software Engineer

2014 - 2016
Numenta
  • Contributed as an inventor on US patent: “Sparse distributed representation of spatial-temporal data."
  • Conducted research in integrating observations from neuroscience into a theory for a general prediction, anomaly detection, and sensorimotor learning system.
  • Created experiments and prototypes demonstrating geospatial prediction, natural language processing, and sensorimotor learning using the HTM platform.
  • Optimized Python and C++ learning algorithms for 10x speedup in running experiments.
  • Created visualizations of AI algorithms using a JavaScript 3D engine for education and research.
Technologies: Unity, C++, Python

Member of Technical Staff

2013 - 2014
HUMIN
  • Designed and built much of the Humin iOS app as the first engineering hire.
  • Created a data ingestion system that collects data for machine learning algorithm from user's linked communications and social media accounts, running completely on their mobile device for scalability and privacy.
  • Created a machine learning algorithm that estimates a user's strength of relationship with each of their connections.
Technologies: C, Objective-C, iOS

Software Engineer

2012 - 2012
LinkedIn
  • Developed user customization features in the mobile web LinkedIn app for improved user experience.
  • Ported features developed for mobile web to Android native app.
  • Worked across mobile web and Android team to ensure compatibility of features using a shared codebase.
Technologies: Java, Android, JavaScript

Founder

2009 - 2012
ReversEntropy, LLC
  • Developed and marketed Pollux, an automatic music tagging software.
  • Achieved 45,000 free downloads and 7,000 subscription purchases.
  • Featured on Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech show.
Technologies: AppleScript, Objective-C, MacOS

Intern, System Applications for Mac OS X

2011 - 2011
Apple
  • Improved responsiveness and user experience of the login screen in Mac OS X Lion.
  • Conceived, designed, and prototyped a new feature for the next major OS.
  • Presented prototype of a new OS X feature to a panel of Apple managers and directors.
Technologies: Objective-C, MacOS

Orbit

http://playwithorbit.com/
Orbit is a relaxing, meditative game for iOS and Android that features a gravity simulator at the heart of a puzzle game. Launch planets with a flick of your finger, and try to get them into stable orbits around black holes.

Orbit features a sandbox where you can create your own levels, and publish your creations to the world for everyone to play.

Chetan designed, developed, and launched Orbit as his first game release. He developed the game using Unity / C# for the client and AWS for the backend. Orbit has achieved over 6 million installs to date on the App/Play Stores.

Sound Sky

http://playsoundsky.com/
Sound Sky is a meditative musical experience for iOS and Android wherein you can explore a universe made of music. Each planet you visit contains a unique song — learn to play the drums in the song by hitting the notes on time.

Once you’ve got the hang of the song, the notes will gradually fade away; you can close your eyes, listen to the music, and keep drumming by ear. Develop your inner sense of rhythm and learn drumbeats while exploring the Sound Sky universe.

Chetan designed, developed, and released Sound Sky as his second game release. He developed the game using Unity / C# for the client and Firebase / Google Cloud for the backend. Over the course of development, he built up a team including two others who are continuing to iterate on the game.

Chetan also created for Sound Sky a generative music engine that creates entire songs in real-time and blends them together in an endless mix.

Cerebro 3

https://github.com/chetan51/cerebro3
A web-based visualization platform for deep neural networks.

Commissioned by Numenta (a cutting-edge AI research company), Chetan created a Python module that can patch any Pytorch module to save neural network weights during training as a series of images. He also created a JavaScript package that can import saved weights from the Python module and visualize them as an animating heatmap.

Applications of Hierarchical Temporal Memory (an AI Talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=900nFOfzp2E
While working at Numenta, Chetan gave a talk at an official Numenta workshop on the applications of the hierarchical temporal memory (HTM). The talk features a description of the geospatial tracking algorithm that Chetan designed, prototyped, and eventually was awarded a US patent for.

Languages

C#, Python, JavaScript, C++, Objective-C, C, AppleScript, Java, Ruby

Frameworks

Unity, Vuetify, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

Tools

Git, Plotly, Photoshop 2018, Jira

Other

Game Development, Front-end Development, Mobile App Development, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Vuexfire, Machine Learning

Libraries/APIs

Vue, Node.js, D3.js, Three.js, Plotly.js

Paradigms

Agile

Platforms

iOS, Firebase, MacOS, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, Amazon EC2

Storage

Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, Cloud Firestore, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB

2008 - 2012

Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

UC Berkeley - Berkeley, CA

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