Charles Grassi

2025–NOW ACTIVE

Chief Technology Officer

Events Arena

Architected and built the operating platform of a sports and events travel company: booking intake from partner channels, stock and contiguous-seat allocation, pricing engine, ticket logistics and competitor price monitoring. A Claude agent, an AI mailroom and an autonomous build loop run in production.

FastAPI PostgreSQL Claude API AI Agents

2026 CO-FOUNDER

Co-founder & Graphics Lead

HYPERDRYFT

Node-based live-visuals engine: graphs compile to multipass WGSL and run on WebGPU, driven by real-time audio analysis (FFT, in-house beat tracking). AI copilot that builds graphs and writes WGSL kernels from a prompt. Desktop (Rust, wgpu, Tauri) and web.

WebGPU WGSL Rust / wgpu Audio-reactive

2025 EMMY-NOMINATED PROJECT

Technical Artist & Graphics Programmer

Nexus Studios

Worked on Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema for Meta Quest, nominated for a 2026 Primetime Emmy in Outstanding Emerging Media Program. Built real-time global illumination using SDF representations for VR environments, and GPU compute pipelines for light baking.

Compute Shaders SDF VR Global Illumination

2023–2024 LEADERSHIP

Chief Technology Officer

SABDA

Led technical direction for 16K immersive installation with 360° projection. Architected projection mapping pipelines and managed 64-channel spatial audio.

Projection Mapping Spatial Audio Real-time 3D Team Leadership

2023 LEAD

Lead Graphics Programmer

Little Red Dog Games

Directed team of graphics engineers developing high-performance VFX with compute shaders and Burst-compiled code.

Compute Shaders Burst VFX Team Lead

2023 SENIOR

Senior Graphics Programmer

22cans

Created shader library targeting mobile and desktop. Developed grass rendering system with volumetric lighting across hardware tiers.

HLSL Mobile Volumetrics Grass

2023 EXPERT

Shader Expert

GN3RA

Developed HDRP cloth shader system covering many fabric types. Optimized VFX with physically-based subsurface scattering.

HDRP Cloth Simulation VFX

2022 EXPERT

Shader Expert

DREST

Delivered specialized shader solutions for fashion tech including realistic fabric rendering and PBR workflows.

Fashion Tech Materials Optimization

2021–2022 GRAPHICS

Graphics Programmer

Scapin' · The Sandbox

Engineered custom lighting system for web3 social applications. Built stylized cloud shader with layered parallax.

Lighting Mobile Optimization Web3

2021–2022 DEVELOPER

Unity Developer & Technical Artist

Lunchbox Entertainment

Created custom shaders including terrain, clouds, water with caustics, and bubble VFX for game environments.

Water Shaders VFX Environment Art

2021 ENGINEER

Graphics Engineer

H3 Space

Developed graphics solutions for AR/VR across Quest 2 and HoloLens 2. Optimized particle systems and post-processing.

AR/VR Optimization 3D Math

2020–2021 ORIGIN

Technical Artist

Ubisoft

My first job: shaders and VFX on a small title.

Shaders VFX