Erik Olof Gunnar Andersson · Engineering Leader

Profile

Engineering at the scale of real-time worlds.

I'm an engineering leader at Blizzard Entertainment with nearly two decades in the games industry. I currently help lead game server engineering for World of Warcraft. I have helped build engineering teams across Sweden, the United States, and France.

Earlier in my career, I was one of the engineers who designed and built out Blizzard Cloud, a multi-thousand-server, multi-cloud platform carrying demanding real-time workloads across the globe. Throughout, I've stayed close to the open-source community. It shaped how I think about distributed systems.

Today I work from Erikslund, a quiet village by the Ljungan river in northern Sweden, proof that you can build for the whole world without leaving the forest.

Experience

Where I've built.

Engineering Leader — Game Server Engineering & Cloud

2009 — Present

Blizzard Entertainment Ånge · Irvine · Versailles

Help lead engineering for the game servers behind World of Warcraft, and helped build the cloud platform supporting real-time games from both Blizzard and Activision, including Call of Duty.

Help lead game server engineering for World of Warcraft — the backend services that keep a global, persistent online world responsive and reliable.
Supported the design and build-out of Blizzard Cloud, a multi-thousand-server global multi-cloud used for demanding real-time games such as World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Call of Duty.
Helped build and mentor engineering teams across sites in Sweden, the United States, and France.

Core Reviewer & Contributor

2014 — Present

OpenStack Open source Stackalytics

Long-time contributor to OpenStack, the open-source cloud platform, with core-reviewer responsibility across two projects.

Core reviewer for Designate (DNS-as-a-Service), shaping the project across multiple releases.
Core reviewer for Senlin (clustering and auto-scaling as a service).
Reviewed, mentored, and shipped features used in production clouds worldwide.

Track record

Where I've made an impact.

Three domains where I've led, shipped, and shaped technology that runs at global scale.

World of Warcraft

Game servers at global scale

Helped lead game server engineering for World of Warcraft, one of the largest and longest-running online worlds ever built, keeping a persistent, real-time experience fast and reliable for players across the planet.

Game development · live operations · reliability

Cloud

The cloud behind Blizzard

Helped build and operate Blizzard Cloud, the multi-thousand-server global multi-cloud behind Blizzard's real-time games. Most of it ran on OpenStack, where I went deepest, but I worked across the multiple cloud solutions that make up the wider platform.

OpenStack · multi-cloud · operations

Open Source

Core reviewer & library author

A decade of contributing in the open: OpenStack core reviewer on Designate (DNS-as-a-Service) and Senlin (auto-scaling), and author of AMQPStorm, a widely used Python messaging library.

OpenStack · Python · mentorship

Capabilities

What I bring to a team.

Leadership

Engineering leadership
Team building & mentorship
Hiring
Technical strategy
Cross-site collaboration
Reliability

Systems & Cloud

Real-time game servers
Global multi-cloud
Distributed systems
High availability
Auto-scaling & capacity
OpenStack

Tools

Software development
Linux
Docker
Cloud
CI/CD
IoT
AI

In short

Build for the world. Live in the forest.

I care about systems that stay quietly reliable at scale, teams that grow the people in them, and the idea that even the smallest place can be connected to everything. If that resonates, I'd be glad to talk.

Let's build something that lasts.