Principal engineer for hire.
Contract delivery from architecture through implementation.
Thirty years of shipped software — game engines and graphics, distributed backends, and adversarial evaluation of frontier AI coding models.
I'm Lee Hickey, a principal consultant available for remote contract engagements.
Independent contractor and principal engineer with 30+ years delivering rendering engines, distributed systems, games and SaaS. Currently building a game on custom C/Vulkan tech, and testing where frontier AI coding models fail.
Recent Decisions
View allRoom abstraction over NATS JetStream for game backends
Designing Pulse — the backend layer for an unannounced tycoon sim. Needed session semantics, pub/sub messaging, and a path to multiplayer without standing up bespoke game-server infrastructure.
Jun 2024NATS JetStream over Kafka for event ingestion
Building a distributed analytics and feature-flag backend for a SaaS client. Multiple Golang services needed to publish events reliably. The team was small and already used NATS for service messaging.
Apr 2020Vulkan plus in-process WebRTC for desktop screen sharing
A client needed native Mac and Windows apps with real-time screen sharing. Electron was too heavy; the rendering path needed GPU access. WebRTC was the transport layer of choice for latency.
Recent Writing
View allDesigning tasks that break coding agents
Notes on building graded evaluation environments — why the interesting failures are never the ones you set out to find.
May 2026The missing competitive tycoon
Why I am building a new sim after Monopoly Tycoon — and what Townscaper and rival businesses have to do with it.
Jan 2025What contract engineering ownership looks like
How I approach contract engagements — from profiling a cook pipeline to shipping a distributed backend.
Available for contract work
Need a senior engineer who can own a problem end-to-end — profiling a cook pipeline, shipping a distributed backend, or finding where a coding model breaks? Get in touch.