About Me
I'm Vlad, a developer and toolmaker. I spent two years at Meta FAIR Labs building 3D asset pipelines for embodied AI research, I've shipped 20+ games under jam deadlines, and I write fiction when I should be sleeping. This site is the sandbox — whatever I'm poking at ends up here.
Most interesting problems turn out to be two smaller problems: the tooling and the taste. I handle the tooling. If I have to do the same manual step twice, I write a script. If I have to do it a hundred times, I write the script properly — so it stops being my problem entirely.
Experience
Meta FAIR Labs
Built the pipeline tools that processed the HSSD-Hab dataset — 18,000+ 3D assets and 211 scenes — which became the foundation for Habitat 3 and the PARTNR benchmark I co-authored at NeurIPS 2024. Took a 15-step manual asset workflow down to two buttons, and cut per-asset iteration time in half. The whole job was making the asset wrangling invisible so researchers could just research.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Built and optimized a Unity app for teaching mechanical engineering statics. Revamped the core gameplay for 10+ levels, engineered physics simulations that actually showed how joints behave, and refactored the UI so it didn't fall apart across 16+ screen sizes.
MassDiGI at WPI
Lead artist on Merge Surge — set the art direction, modeled, textured, rigged, and animated 3 enemy types, 2 bosses, the towers, and the trailer. Worked on Triage, a medical simulator built with Yale, creating 20+ environmental assets. Also programmed on Bloom Blast. The internship equivalent of being thrown in the deep end and told to swim.
How I Work
The jams did more for me than most of my classes. Not because "constraints breed creativity" — that's motivational poster stuff — but because a 72-hour deadline forces you to actually finish something, and finishing is where you find out what you'd do differently.
I don't over-engineer. If a script does the job, it's a script. If the job changes shape, the script gets replaced. The best pipeline tool is the one nobody notices because it just works — and the best way to keep it that way is to not romanticize it.