Unboxing XR Dev Careers: From Game to VR/AR Enterprise App Developer

Unboxing XR Dev Careers: From Game to VR/AR Enterprise App Developer with OssoVR’s Co-Founder, CTO and Senior Recruiter (former EA, Oculus)

In our new event series „Unboxing XR Dev Careers“, we are speaking with the top XR tech leads from the largest XR teams worldwide on stage.

Osso VR’s Founders have recently raised $27M USD to train surgeons in VR (total funding $43M) and have hired a team of over 110 employees – one of the largest XR dev teams in the industry.

Both speakers have previously been working and built teams at large game companies (EA, THQ, Cryptic, Reliq, Oculus) before founding and joining Osso VR.

They will speak about:
=> Crack the formula of how a game dev/designer transforms into an enterprise (medical) XR dev/designer.
=> What other tech skills do you need to know, what should you add to your portfolio, what are tech stacks should you be focusing on?
=> Is development for enterprise solutions as exciting as being a game dev?
=> What are the secrets behind building large XR teams quickly?

Followed by an AMA session!

Bios of speakers

John Ptucha, Senior Recruiter at OssoVR

I began my recruiting career over 13 years ago at a small MMORPG development house called Cryptic Studios. Equipped with nothing but a Literature degree from UC Santa Cruz and a lifelong love of games, movies, special effects, and art, I was given the opportunity to hire across all disciplines at the company, helping to build out the development teams for Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and more.

I was recruited away from Cryptic to join Oculus right as the Facebook acquisition closed in 2014. I helped grow the company from 200 employees to over 2000 over the course of the first few years while supporting and directly partnering with many industry leaders that I grew up admiring. I also assisted in staffing up Oculus Story Studio and Facebook’s original Social VR team, working alongside world-class artists, animators, and engineers from Pixar, Dreamworks, and Lucasfilm.

After 4 years of helping Oculus and Facebook exponentially grow their VR teams, I joined Slack to help them build out multiple engineering teams across their rapidly growing organization, including Mobile, Backend, and Data. I spent 2 and a half years with Slack before the Salesforce acquisition was announced. I began to casually look into outside opportunities when I was introduced to Osso VR and our CEO. After one conversation with him and a look at the product and platform, I was incredibly excited by how much we could help people with the power of VR. I joined Osso 6 months ago as their first in-house recruiter, hiring for roles across all disciplines.

Matt Newport, CTO & Co-Founder at OssoVR

Matt Newport is a veteran game developer who co-founded Osso VR with the idea that engaging, immersive video game technology could be used for good. As Chief Technology Officer, Matt leads the strategic direction of development while managing a team of highly-trained engineers.

Prior to co-founding Osso VR, Matt had a passion for games and worked for over 15 years at studios both big and small, including EA and THQ. He has 9 game development credits and was one of Oculus’ early backers for their Kickstarter campaign.

Originally hailing from the U.K., Matt now resides in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. He pairs his extensive professional expertise of virtual reality with a love for the outdoors, and snowboards and hikes often when the weather allows. Besides being fluent in a plethora of programming languages, Matt also speaks Farsi.

Moderation

Vangelis Lympouridis, PhD, founder of EnosisVR and Faculty at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Roundtable

Rian Luke (Meta Headhunting)

XR Bootcamp Notes

You can already join the discussion today by joining the XR Creators Discord Server.

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