Mark Hutchinson

Mark Hutchinson

Hi! I’m a software professional living in Toronto, Canada. I work on games played by millions of people. I’ve been described as curious, empathetic and hardworking.

My wife Katie is the executive director of VIBE Arts, a charitable organization dedicated to providing children and youth in under-resourced communities with arts education. She also coaches for Leaside Volleyball Club. We have an adorable, old, and blind dog named Stuckey.

I studied Computer Science at the University of Waterloo where I was in the co-operative education program. This gave me the opportunity to have internships at a variety of different companies like IBM and Blackberry. After graduating I worked at IBM for 3 years before moving to San Francisco to start at Zynga. In 2014 I relocated back to Toronto to work at Zynga Toronto where I worked until 2022. I'm currently at a start up called Limit Break working on some exciting projects.

I love travelling, getting outside, learning new things, urban design, craft beer, and strong coffee.

Limit Break

Limit Break | May 2022 - Present

Zynga Poker

Zynga | February 2016 - May 2022

  • Zynga Poker is the world's most popular online Poker Game. Available on Facebook, iOS, Android and Kindle.
  • Technical Lead managing a team of 4-5 developers
  • Delivered many features using Unity/Flash/PHP including: Challenges, Leagues weekly Leaderboard, Lucky Bonus Slot Machine, VIP Center, and XP Progression
  • Replaced Flash web Game with Unity WebGL game in 2018
  • Core member of small team that rewrote legacy PHP backend in Go Microservices in 2019-2021, using the Nakama game server for multiplayer poker logic.

Scramble With Friends / Word Streak With Friends

Zynga | September 2014 - February 2016

  • Scramble with Friends is a word game available on iOS and Android
  • Worked on rebranding the iOS game to Word Streak with Friends
  • Redid every screen in the game using Objective-C & Interface Builder and game board in Cocos2D

FarmVille 2

Zynga | August 2011 - September 2014

  • FarmVille 2 launched in September 2012 and became the top game on Facebook, with more than 9 million daily active users
  • Mentored developers, estimated development costs for new features, managed developer project allocation as “pod lead” of 4-5 software engineers
  • Lead the development of large projects such as the “County Fair” competitive leaderboard feature, and the “first time user experience” tutorial where I created a much-reused scriptable tutorial system. Delivered these challenging multi-month projects on time
  • Developed features for FarmVille 2 in ActionScript and PHP

Rational Application Developer / Eclipse

IBM Canada | June 2008 - August 2011

  • Java Development for IBM Rational Application Developer XML Web Services Tools
  • Contributor to open source Eclipse WebTools Platform
  • Technologies used: Java, SWT, XML Web Services (WSDL, SOAP etc), WebSphere Application Server, Apache Tomcat
Contact me on LinkedIn
email me
check out my Instagram
Github