Dan Fessler

Executive Summary

Engineering and product leader with 20 years in interactive entertainment across consumer-facing games, UGC platforms, avatar expression, AI-native products, and high-craft UI systems.

I have led and grown multidisciplinary teams from founding stage through scaled production, including 30+ person organizations spanning UI/UX, web, tools, brand, first-party experiences, and character cosmetics. I stay close to the work: reviewing architecture, building prototypes, clarifying tradeoffs, and helping teams turn ambiguous product bets into shipped experiences.

I bring a rare blend of client-side engineering depth, creative direction, user experience judgment, and management practice. I am strongest where product, design, research, backend/platform engineering, and client UI teams need shared language, fast learning loops, and a high quality bar for consumer-facing experiences.

Highlights

• 20 years building consumer-facing interactive entertainment across mobile, social, web, AI, avatar, and UGC platforms
• 10+ years in executive and team leadership roles; built, managed, and mentored multidisciplinary teams of 15-30+
• Client-side product UI background: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Luau, Canvas2D, WebGL, Unity/C#, design systems, tooling, and performance-minded interaction work
• Strong product partnership: translated ambiguous ideas into prototypes, roadmaps, scope tradeoffs, and production-quality releases with product, design, research, engineering, and executive stakeholders
• User experience focus from both engineering and creative leadership; deep instincts for clarity, polish, storytelling, accessibility of complex workflows, and player/member delight
• AI-forward leader: co-founded an AI-first studio, shipped agentic UGC prototypes, and uses GenAI as a multiplier for exploration, tooling, and iteration
• Comfortable with distributed, cross-discipline teams and high-ambiguity product cycles where judgment is validated through customer signals, usage data, and rapid experimentation

Experience

Senior Software Engineer (Experience / UI Systems)

Roblox

Aug 2025 - present

Senior Software Engineer on Roblox's Expression team, building avatar expression features and frontend platform capabilities that power player-facing Avatar experiences at consumer scale.

Highlights

• Contributed to a large company-wide initiative bringing cosmetic makeup to avatars, improving thumbnailing and rendering pipelines that serve millions of players
• Bridged creative and engineering concerns on avatar rendering quality, helping translate visual intent into scalable technical implementation
• Improved internal developer tooling through an org-wide debugging framework across client and web-proxy layers, accelerating client-side development on Roblox's Luau/React frontend platform
• Worked on integrating JSX-style language syntax into Luau to improve UI authoring ergonomics and frontend developer velocity
• Raised engineering quality through design reviews, code reviews, pragmatic iteration, and clear communication across product, design, and engineering partners

Projects

Roblox

Global immersive platform where avatar identity, expression, and discovery reach millions of players.

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Avatar Makeup

Company-wide avatar customization launch introducing modular makeup across Marketplace and avatar customization surfaces.

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Co-founder (Product, Engineering, and Creative Leadership)

Incite Interactive

May 2023 - 2025

Co-founded an AI-first games and product studio funded by a16z SPEEDRUN. Led product, engineering, design, creative, and brand work while launching Incite Worlds, an agentic UGC platform, and developing Auravale, an agentic life sim built on the platform.

Highlights

• Recruited, grew, and managed a cross-discipline team of roughly 15 artists, designers, and engineers with clear ownership, high craft standards, and sustainable execution rhythms
• Partnered across product, design, engineering, and research signals to turn a broad AI/UGC vision into testable prototypes, roadmap decisions, and production releases
• Drove feature, scope, and timeline tradeoffs as both company leader and hands-on builder, keeping product learning moving without losing sight of technical maintainability
• Designed and implemented AI-native visual programming experiences in React to make agentic scenario authoring more accessible and less intimidating for creators
• Developed and open-sourced React-Dockable, a dockable UI system used by Incite Worlds to support complex tools, customizable workflows, and rapid product iteration
• Used GenAI and agentic systems as core product primitives rather than demos, exploring how AI changes creation, storytelling, tooling, and user experience

Projects

Incite Worlds

Agentic UGC platform; led product and engineering direction while shipping creator-facing web experiences and prototypes.

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Auravale

Agentic life sim built on Incite Worlds; directed product, character, animation, and creator workflows from prototype through production.

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Chief Visual Officer (Founding Team)

Manticore Games

Jan 2017 - May 2023

Joined Manticore as employee #1 to build Core, a next-generation UGC platform. Reported to the CEO and led UI/UX, Web, Tools, Marketing, Brand Partnerships, First Party experiences, and Character Cosmetics while remaining hands-on with frontend prototypes, web experiences, tooling, and technical art systems.

Highlights

• Built and scaled teams of 30+ across multiple disciplines; established quality bars, critique culture, execution rhythms, and leadership practices for a growing organization
• Acted as an engineering/product partner to executive, product, design, engineering, and insights stakeholders on creator-facing and player-facing platform experiences
• Navigated complex project tradeoffs across feature scope, brand priorities, creator tooling, first-party content, staffing, and launch timelines
• Drove rapid experimentation through coded prototypes for UX patterns, creator workflows, world discovery, and visual programming before committing to larger builds
• Built client-side prototypes and production web experiences using React/SSG, Canvas2D, and JavaScript to communicate product direction and reduce decision risk
• Created internal tools, pipelines, shaders, and visual systems that improved iteration speed, consistency, and long-term maintainability across teams

Projects

Core

UGC platform; led UI/UX, web, tools, brand, first-party, and character cosmetics efforts while building prototypes and tooling for creator and discovery experiences.

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Core Visual Programming

React prototype for accessible creator scripting that compiled to Lua, built to test interaction patterns and reduce product ambiguity.

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Art Directing the Metaverse

Published perspective on bringing creative direction, systems thinking, and quality standards to an open-ended UGC platform.

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Art Director (R&D + Production)

Zynga

Sep 2012 - Dec 2016

Art Director across shipped mobile/social titles and R&D prototypes. Worked with designers, engineers, and production teams to explore new interaction concepts, ship live products, and keep quality high under real delivery constraints.

Highlights

• Led creative direction and production quality across multiple shipped titles including Solstice Arena, Empires and Allies, Mountain Goat Mountain, and Farmville workstreams
• Partnered cross-functionally to prototype and evaluate early-stage social, mobile, and VR concepts with an emphasis on clarity, delight, and feasibility
• Built interactive prototypes and tools in Unity/C# and web technologies to accelerate iteration and reduce risk for product decisions
• Managed craft, schedule, and implementation tradeoffs in fast-moving production and R&D environments

Projects

Solstice Arena

Shipped multiplayer battle arena title.

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Empires and Allies

Shipped modern military strategy title.

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Mountain Goat Mountain

Shipped mobile and VR title with approachable, high-craft interaction design.

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Lead Artist (Founding Team)

A Bit Lucky

Jan 2010 - Sep 2012

Founding art team member for Facebook/social games. Helped define style, pipelines, UI quality, and production practices while bridging creative direction with tooling and frontend implementation.

Highlights

• Managed, directed, and tasked in-house and outsourced art teams while supporting production delivery on social games
• Designed and implemented player-facing storefront UI and game surfaces for Lucky Space using HTML/JavaScript
• Built animation tools, render scripts, and Photoshop automation to improve turnaround, consistency, and quality across production
• Collaborated closely with engineering and product partners to ship features and improve usability

Projects

Lucky Train

Shipped social game where players build and manage a railroad network.

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Lucky Space

Shipped space colony management social game with player-facing storefront and game UI.

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