Trevor Fountain is a co-founder at Quail, a software startup building small-business tools for small-town entrepreneurs, and a founder at Birdworks, a game development studio publishing original & approachable games for PC, mobile, and consoles. Prior to that, he was a co-founder at Majeure, a software engineering consultancy building bespoke full-stack tools for healthcare & professional service enterprises in the UK, a senior software engineer at Palantir Technologies, a big-data software development and consulting company, a co-founder at Blazing Griffin, a game development studio in Edinburgh, and a publisher at Far Off Places, a magazine of written whimsy.
He obtained his Ph.D in computational linguistics from the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, where he studied models of natural language categorisation and hierarchy inference under Mirella Lapata. He obtained his undergraduate degree from The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Computer Science, from which he graduated with honours as one of the first class of Turing Scholars.
He is a skilled software developer and interface/interaction designer, as comfortable building modern full-stack web applications in React and Java as he is shipping delightful cross-platform mobile apps or slinging pixels across the GPU in game development. He has worked as part of a large team (at Lockheed Martin and Sun Microsystems), as a leader of small teams (at Palantir and Blazing Griffin), and as a co-founder in a couple of small startups. If you're looking for a lightning-fast user interface designer, a highly trained data scientist, or a mentorship-focused engineering team leader, he can be bought.
Sole founder on a game development studio focusing on approachable, family-friendly games for desktop and mobile platforms. The most recent Birdworks production — Governor of the West, a turn-based simulation with puzzle elements and a delightful American West aesthetic — was released onto Steam in July 2024.
Co-founder on a software company that provides point-of-sale and reporting tools to antique stores & vendor malls. Grew the company from an innocent question into a thriving ($750k+ ARR) software ecosystem that is used every day by thousands of people across the world to run their small business.
Co-Founder at a software consultancy building bespoke critical systems for enterprise clients in the UK, EU, and AMEA, with a focus on healthcare (especially clinical trials and pharmaceutical research) and professional service (legal & financial) clients. Primarily focused on internal-facing developer tools to accelerate delivery of client projects.
Led teams of 2-8 engineers and consultants to develop custom solutions to data and analysis problems at tremendous scale. Built realtime alerting systems for national intelligence agencies in the Middle East, cutting-edge research systems for a major UK oil producer, fraud detection tools for a US customer-facing Fortune 1000 company, and the primary manufacturing system for a major European aircraft manufacturer.
Designed a technology strategy for a games & multimedia startup and oversaw development of iOS and PC projects. Hired and managed an engineering team, developed new IP, and grew the company from two people in a coffeeshop to a full-time staff of eleven.
Designed, developed, and deployed a strategy for increasing engagement with the arts through creative use of consumer technology.
Designed a business strategy and supporting publishing system for a literary magazine spanning multiple distribution channels and payment models, including a custom iOS app and online subscription delivery service.
Built a web interface and a cross-platform desktop GUI for a semantic parser, and invented a domain-specific parser description language used by researchers to rapidly prototype new feature extractors.
Extended various open-source packages to assemble an in-house system for asset and issue tracking that became a core part of Sun Austin's data center offering.
Worked with a team of engineers to develop enterprise software tools used to build the F-35.
Typescript, C#, Java, Javascript, Objective-C, Swift, Ruby, C, C++
macOS, most *nixes, Microsoft Windows XP, Macintosh System 7
Unity3D, Godot, WebGL, Electron, Postgresql, React Native, Dropwizard, Stripe, React, Cocoa, Apache Kafka