Introducing our Founding Engineer

Connor Walsh is joining as Principal Software Engineer

Exia Labs’ mission is to develop winning warfighting strategies for the US and her allies. In our last blog post, we demonstrated the technical feasibility of generating winning strategies in a simple educational wargame with no combat. The next step is to generate winning strategies in a full-spectrum, joint, operational-level analytical wargame with combat. That requires building a game and AI that is an order of magnitude more complex. That’s why we are excited to announce that Connor Walsh is joining Exia Labs to lead the development of this effort.

Introducing Connor Walsh

Connor joins us after an eight year run at Riot Games, where his most recent role was as a Senior Software Engineer working on an unannounced game project. Connor played a pivotal role in the development of VALORANT, especially on core gameplay technology, where he built gun systems, replication, and netcode. Connor also made significant contributions to the game’s service backend, scaling it from initial load tests of 5,000 concurrent users to over 2 million. He developed a novel solution for horizontally scaling VALORANT's backend Golang services using Redis and integrated the central Riot Games API SDK into VALORANT, unlocking the ability to ship the game on consoles.

Looking Ahead

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