Michael Kazakov

Principal R&D Engineer at Synopsys Inc

Greater Exeter Area

About

Experience

  • Synopsys Inc (7 yrs 7 mos)
    • Principal R&D Engineer
      May 2026 - Present · 2 mos

    • Sr Staff R&D Engineer
      Feb 2024 - May 2026 · 2 yrs 4 mos

    • Staff R&D Engineer
      Dec 2021 - Feb 2024 · 2 yrs 3 mos

  • Software Developer / Owner at Independent Software Vendor
    Feb 2013 - May 2026 · 13 yrs 4 mos

    Created the file management application for Mac called Nimble Commander. In addition to the tasks related to the product’s development, I currently manage the sales, marketing, customer support and system administration for Nimble Commander. The project is written in C++/Objective-C++ and has an emphasis on responsiveness, low resource consumption and general efficiency. I developed a set of virtual file systems for this project, to include support of: archives browsing, traditional filing protocols like FTP and SSH, object storage protocols like WebDAV and Dropbox. Among other notable features, I also wrote the XPC-based service which allows execution of POSIX functions with privileges of a super-user. Technologies: C++, Objective-C, POSIX, Cocoa

  • Senior Lecturer at Altai State Technical University
    Jan 2015 - May 2018 · 3 yrs 5 mos

    Giving a set of lectures and supervising projects on Elements of Computer Vision for the Software Engineering Master’s Program. While developing the course, I used my previous Ph.D. study work regarding various applications of feature descriptors and semantic graph properties. Given master’s projects have an emphasis on native software development, including manual calculus and memory management. Focused topics: images transformations, feature detectors and descriptors, image matching and classification

  • CEO / Co-owner / Co-founder at Alawar Stargaze
    2007 - 2012 · 5 yrs

    When the company later became an internal studio of Alawar Entertainment, I continued to manage the team and gradually grew it from 10 to 60+ employees. As CEO, I was directly responsible for the releases of 16 game titles on PC, Mac, iOS, Android and PlayStation. As a software engineer, I participated in the development of the game engine employed by the company. My most notable contribution was porting the game engine from Wintel to cross-platform. Another noteworthy project was the heavy optimization of the flagship quest game for PC to make it run smoothly on the first-generation iPhone, which had 412Mhz ARMv6 CPU, 24 MB VRAM and 40Mb RAM for an application. Technologies: C++, C#, Objective-C, Lua, MFC, Win32, Cocoa, WPF, DirectX, OpenGL

  • CEO / Co-owner / Co-founder at Stargaze Interactive
    2003 - 2007 · 4 yrs

    Was the Co-Founder and leader of the first video game development studio in the region. We delivered 4 game titles in the Casual genre to PC platform. Being responsible for a tiny studio, I wore many hats ranging from software development and network administration to accounting and project management. As a software engineer, I focused mostly on the internal toolset and components for the game engine. Technologies: C++, Lua, MFC, Win32, DirectX