Sam Silvester

I started Silvester Labs, where I help early-stage startups solve real technical and scientific challenges and explore my own research projects. This mission is borne out of my learned experience that the best innovations are not birthed by the companies able to raise the most funding but by those that learn to embrace constraint.

I worked at Improbable, where I became a principal engineer. I transformed Improbable's virtual worlds technology into a platform suitable for low latency action games, which I validated by implementing the highest scale fully-dense shooter game ever built.

I was also the lead of the networking team. My team was responsible for:

• Cutting-edge novel simulation compression layer that achieves huge bandwidth reduction in real-time, allowing for thousands of players in dense environments.
• Distributed low-latency networking stack, enabling 10,000x the ops per second of traditional games through horizontal scaling and level-of-detail protocols.
• Custom ultra high performance Unreal Engine fork, reassembling UE5's core logic to scale to 20k players.
• Novel spatial audio stack that allows 20k players to talk to each other in real-time.

I also worked as:

• An R&D team tech lead, where I rapidly iterated on new rendering and networking techniques to hit our record-breaking scale.
• A customer engineer, embedded in indie and AAA studios to solve their problems and integrate their engines with Improbable's platform.
• A platform architect, driving the long term product and technical direction of the company.

I studied Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, focussing on computational neuroscience and how deep learning helps us understand the human brain.

Early years

I learnt to code as a child, created educational programming videos as one of the earliest Roblox ambassadors and independently developed and self published a video game.