Jon Kenkel
LEAD SOFTWARE ENGINEER // INDIEGEMS
I lead a team building an online gaming platform for Godot and HTML5 games — backend services, a custom engine and IDE, a web storefront, and the cloud infrastructure underneath all of it.
Before that, ten years at Hi-Rez Studios and RallyHere Interactive working on live-service games and the platforms they run on, from Unreal Engine 3 gameplay and console certification through to a multi-tenant SaaS platform serving six studios.
- role
- Lead Software Engineer
- company
- IndieGems
- since
- Jan 2026
- engines
- UE 3/4/5, Godot, Unity
- languages
- C++, Rust, Python, C#
- cloud
- Azure, Google Cloud
- shipped
- 6 titles
The résumé is a two-page PDF. Use the download button above to open it.
About
I'm a software engineer in Atlanta working on the systems behind online games — identity, inventory, commerce, matchmaking, and the tooling studios use to ship on top of them.
Most of my career has been the unglamorous half of games: the services that stay up when a title launches, the SDKs that let a game talk to six storefronts, and the internal tools that let support staff fix a player's account at 2am. I've worked on that problem at every scale, from a single Unreal Engine 3 codebase to a multi-tenant platform serving six studios, and most recently from an empty repository.
These days I lead a team at IndieGems building a platform for Godot and HTML5 games, which has meant a Rust backend, a fork of Godot with a custom IDE, and a fair amount of time spent working out where AI coding agents genuinely help a game team and where they get in the way.
GitHub activity — last 12 months
Most of my work is in private repositories, so these show as activity without detail.
Contact
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything, and I'm happy to talk about platform engineering, live-service infrastructure, or engine tooling.