About Me

I'm Zach Kehs. I'm working full-time on a video game project of mine. I don't have much to share yet - stay tuned!

Career

I worked as a software engineer for about a decade before quitting to work on my game project in 2024. I think of this as an extended sabbatical rather than a career transition, because games typically don't make money. I will likely return to the tech world if/when I run out of money.

Most recently, I was a software engineer at Meta Reality Labs Research (formerly called Oculus Research). I built simulators and other tools to advance the state of the art in photonics, optics, and display systems.

Previously, I worked at the Uber Advanced Technologies Group, working on motion planning for self driving cars. Before that, I worked at Amazon on backend software, and a robotics lab before that.

I am not looking for work at this time, but you're welcome to try and pitch an idea to me :)

Find me on LinkedIn.

GameDev

The Short Version

I have been passionate about games my whole life. I started designing pen-and-paper games when I was very young, and later taught myself programming to bring my games to life when I was 13 or so. After building a number of freeware games, I started my first "big" game (i.e, that I intended to sell) at the age of 17. Koya Rift was the result after 1.5 years of work. It's not very good, but I'm happy I saw it through to completion. It was a valuable learning experience!

After Koya Rift, I haven't released anything. I have been focusing on my software engineering career while building a new game on nights & weekends. In 2024, I quit my job to work on my new game full-time. I don't have anything public to share about this new game yet, though. Subscribe to my mailing list to be notified when I do. :)

The Long Version

I have a whole separate page for this. Check out my gamedev story.

Thanks for reading! Consider checking out my recent blog posts!