Bob Summerwill

Bob Summerwill

Bob's Resume

Bob Summerwill
Software Engineering Leader
Vancouver, BC · bob@summerwill.net · linkedin.com/in/bobsummerwill · github.com/bobsummerwill
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Thirty years in games, platform engineering and distributed systems: fifteen at Electronic Arts on FIFA, NBA, NHL and the first EA SPORTS UFC; six as Executive Director of a nonprofit, line-managing a team of up to ten across engineering, communications, events and finance; and recent hands-on AI-assisted development work. Enjoys mentoring engineers and helping them develop their skills. Looking to lead an engineering team in Vancouver.

Highlights

  • People leadership: Six years managing the ETC Cooperative’s cross-functional staff, including three engineers directly managed for four years; owned hiring, performance feedback and professional development. Mentored engineers and interviewed candidates across EA roles from 2003, providing technical leadership alongside line managers.

  • Technical strategy and tooling: Progressed from product engineering into build, tooling and architecture leadership during fifteen years at EA. Built tools adopted across teams and chaired the EA SPORTS Architecture Council, collaborating across teams, studios and organizations.

  • Distributed systems and open source: Core developer on the Ethereum Foundation’s C++ client; lead architect at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance launch; six years funding and coordinating Ethereum Classic client teams through seven network upgrades; drove STRATO’s Apache-2.0 release in 2026.

  • AI-assisted development: In 2025–26 built AI-assisted engineering workflows and an MCP server at BlockApps and helped the team adopt them.

Experience

BlockApps STRATO · Head of Ecosystem · Vancouver / Brooklyn · Jan 2025 – Jul 2026

Ecosystem leadership and AI adoption for STRATO, BlockApps’ Haskell-based, Ethereum-compatible platform.

  • Public face of the project in the Ethereum ecosystem: EthCC[9], ETHDenver 2026 (Museum of Ethereum), community programs and launch outreach.

  • Drove the Apache-2.0 open-source release of STRATO into an independent GitHub organisation (strato-net); credited by the company’s co-founder at the March 2026 launch.

  • Built AI-assisted engineering tools and helped the team adopt them: a multi-agent workflow that triages, fixes and reviews GitHub issues (Claude Code and Codex); Griphook, an MCP server exposing platform operations to AI assistants; and transcription tooling with upstream PRs.

ETC Cooperative · Executive Director & Secretary · Vancouver / remote team · Jan 2019 – Dec 2024

  • Ran the nonprofit that funded and coordinated Ethereum Classic client development: the legal entity, direction and budget (annual expenditure reaching US$1.9M), and line management of all staff, up to ten at peak, across software engineering, website development, marketing and communications, finance, and the production of three conferences; published annual retrospectives and financials from 2020.

  • Recruited, interviewed and hired staff and set compensation; gave ongoing performance feedback and supported training and professional development; directly managed three engineers for four years.

  • Led two restructurings after the principal funder ended support, preserving priority engineering capability.

  • Funded and coordinated two independent client teams through seven network-wide upgrades.

  • Vice-chair of the EEA Technical Specification Working Group from 2020; joined Hyperledger.

Ethereum Foundation · ConsenSys / EEA · Engineering, architecture and standards roles · 2016 – 2018

  • Ethereum Foundation, 2016: Core C++ client developer; led the codebase consolidation and the proposed Apache-2.0 relicensing; cross-platform build, release and CI.

  • ConsenSys / Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, 2016–2017: Lead architect at the 2017 launch (30 founding members); presented the roadmap; secretary of the technical working group and set up its first working groups.

  • 2017–2018: Sweetbridge (principal developer); Quantfury (blockchain lead).

TD Securities, DevOps Solutions Architect, Toronto (2015).

Independent and contract development, Vancouver (2014 – 2015): Sony / PlayStation programming consultant; mobile development at Roadhouse Interactive and DeNA.

Electronic Arts · Chertsey, UK → Burnaby, BC · Jan 1999 – May 2014

Programmer to Senior Software Engineer & Architect

Selected game credits: FIFA Football 2004 and 2005; FIFA 06 Road to FIFA World Cup; FIFA 07, 08, 10 and 11, including FIFA Ultimate Team; NBA Live 06; NHL 13–15; EA SPORTS UFC; EA SPORTS UFC Mobile.

  • NHL & UFC architecture, 2012–2014: Software architect for TABU, building the first EA SPORTS UFC and NHL 15 on the shared Wireframe framework; then systems engineering on UFC Mobile.

  • EA SPORTS Label Software Architect, 2012: First dedicated label architect; chaired the new Architecture Council, coordinating technical direction across EA SPORTS teams and platforms.

  • FIFA Advance team and studio technology, 2007–2012: FIFA Advance team (2007–09): next-generation FIFA technology ahead of the shipping team, plus FIFA Ultimate Team; then EA Canada studio-wide tooling and architecture (2009–12) on the Basekit project: TechTracker, tracking package versions and local diffs across 30+ game-team workspaces and ~1,000 packages to drive convergence; Wireframe 2.0.

  • EATech, 2005–2007: Company-wide configuration management (Framework2) in EA’s central technology group. Helped modularise RenderWare into ~60 components with testing and compatibility support; built cross-platform build tooling and Visual Studio project generation adopted across EA.

  • FIFA and EA Canada / Orca CM, 2003–2005: FIFA 2004’s SourceSafe-to-Perforce migration; online lead for FIFA 05 (the first release with Xbox Live support). Technical lead of the Vancouver studio’s configuration management group for the Xbox 360 launch titles FIFA 06 Road to FIFA World Cup and NBA Live 06, as it grew from one team into a team-of-teams of three sub-leads with around fifteen engineers reporting to them. Interviewed candidates and mentored the group’s engineers.

  • EA UK, 1999–2002: Football systems on The FA Premier League Football Manager; built the scripting-language parser and bytecode runtime for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on PS2; Game Development Framework (2002), a cross-company collaboration project.

Psygnosis (Sony), Programmer, Leeds, UK (1996 – 1998): Prophecy and Global Domination (PC, PlayStation).

Independent projects

  • Local LLMs: Hermes Agent running against a self-hosted Qwen 3.8 27B model, served by llama.cpp from a 2 x RTX 3090 + NVLink workstation and shared over Tailscale with several other Linux machines.

  • Early Days of Ethereum: founder and host of the founding-era oral-history project; 14 interviews, 180+ profiles.

Technical skills

C++ (20+ years): PlayStation 1–4, Xbox generations, GameCube and PC; C#, Python, TypeScript; some Haskell. CMake, Perforce, Git, Jenkins, Docker, Unity; Claude Code, Codex and MCP; Linux, Windows and macOS.

Education

BSc Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence, University of Leeds, 1996

Last updated September 2026.