Open to new roles

Tim Smith

Game designer building rewards, progressions, and systems that keep players coming back — most recently on Destiny 2 at Bungie.

QA lead and test strategist who gets technical features out the door at quality — most recently on Destiny 2 at Bungie.

Hiring for QA?

Hiring for design?

Shipped titles
  • Destiny 2Bungie
  • Mobile StrikeMZ
  • Game of War: Fire AgeMZ
  • Battleborn2K Games
  • Evolve2K Games
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel2K Games

01 Work

Work highlights

Monument to Seasons Past in Destiny 2: the Seasonal Archive screen, with an Exchange Chronologs vendor and past seasons grouped under Year of the Final Shape and Year of Lightfall, each with a collection progress bar.

Monument to Seasons Past

An alternate source for past Season Pass rewards. Drove the feature end to end shipping 25 nested sub-vendors, 500+ dynamic offers, a new currency framework, and new UI components that automatically track and communicate what players already own.

The feature was received positively by players while boosting revenues, and increased engagement with existing Season Pass systems through thoughtful currency design.

“A rare win for Bungie.”

— Destructoid
The Eververse emblem: an EV monogram inside a starburst of blue rays.

Eververse Refactor

Rebuilt multiple vendor systems housing 4,000+ offers then built an automation framework for ongoing offer variety with dynamic pricing, reducing typical patch size and implementation costs by >70%.

Destiny 2 combat: a fireteam of Guardians, one firing a rifle and one raising a curved blade, takes on a hulking armored enemy on a rocky plateau.

XP Overhaul

Documented and refactored years of XP reward logic, building a new framework for engagement bonuses, activity rewards, and gameplay earnings in addition to adding server-side tuning capability.

Destiny 2 Rewards Pass for Season 28: Lawless at rank 101, showing the reward track for ranks 101 to 110 and the pass bonuses, including +40% XP and +15% score.

Season Pass Upgrades

Led the team that delivered significant upgrades to the Season Pass system, introducing additional reward logic, new boosts, and an updated visual design.

An Xbox Series X and a PlayStation 5, each with its controller, lit in green and blue.

New Platforms

Led QA for Destiny 2's ports to multiple new platforms and exceeded all internal crash rate, performance, and general defect quality goals. Owned all aspects of the test plan, test team management, and platform certification efforts, coordinating directly with internal engineering and production stakeholders on a daily basis.

QA team size
3–5
Platforms
  • Xbox Series X|S
  • PS5
  • Microsoft Store
  • Epic Games Store
Destiny 2 streaming on Stadia: a phone clipped to a Stadia controller shows a ship in orbit above a planet.

Technical Expertise

Validated the Destiny 2 Stadia client end to end: networking, graphics rendering, audio output and platform-specific social systems.

One-Click Build Deployment

Wrote a script to download, package, configure and upload builds for testing, saving hours of setup time and becoming essential for remote workflows.

Lord Shaxx, Destiny 2's Crucible handler, in orange-and-white armor in front of a red Crucible banner.

Gameplay Foundations

Years of experience validating map integrity, combatant behavior, audio design, and other gameplay-focused features across several franchises.

02 Experience

Career progression

Design QA

Showing design highlights ·

Showing QA highlights ·

  1. Senior Systems Designer

    Nov 2024 — Jul 2026

    Bungie · Destiny 2 Design

    • Drove Monument to Seasons Past: 25 nested sub-vendors, 500+ dynamic offers and a new currency framework. Shipped ahead of schedule; generates millions in monthly revenue.
    • Led a vendor refactor that kept 4,000+ offers while cutting typical patch size 75%, plus automation for perpetual offer variety and dynamic pricing (significantly lower Eververse implementation cost); ran weekly reviews and aligned UI, engineering and test on feature quality.
    • Solely refactored 1,000+ XP rewards and progressions and added server-side variables for dynamic XP, eliminating multi-day XP fixes.
    • Refactored 1,000+ XP reward structures; built automation to validate playtest results and documented expected behavior with test stakeholders.
  2. Systems Designer

    Jul 2022 — Nov 2024

    Bungie · Destiny 2 Design

    • Drove the season pass refactor for extra rewards, gameplay boosts and new progression structures; co-built seasonal weapon frameworks with activity and sandbox design.
    • Owned reward track allocation and Eververse scheduling — time cost and defect rate ~70% below the historical average, with expected earnings retained.
    • Developed and refined test automation for season pass rewards and vendor offers, cutting test cost with no rise in shipped defects.
  3. Class change QA → Systems Design 2022
  4. QA Lead, Platforms

    Nov 2019 — Jul 2022

    Bungie · Destiny 2 QA

    • Owned the platform test plan and team for Destiny 2's ports to Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and alternative PC storefronts. Coordinated directly with internal engineering stakeholders and managed all platform certification.
    • Ran 1:1s and career development for a 3–5 person team; trained hires on GPU profiling, crash debugging and proprietary technical analysis.
    • Coordinated branch integration, performance and hardware compatibility testing.
  5. QA Engineer

    Apr 2018 — Nov 2019

    Bungie · Destiny 2 QA

    • Validated the Destiny 2 Stadia client: networking, graphics rendering, audio output and platform social systems.
    • Built a one-click build deployment script that became part of the studio-wide remote development workflow in 2020.
  6. Senior QA Tester

    Apr 2017 — Apr 2018

    MZ QA

    • Coordinated all test coverage and approved all test cases for Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike.
  7. QA Tester

    Oct 2015 — Apr 2017

    MZ QA

    • Found functional issues and regression-tested fixes for Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike.
  8. QA Tester

    Jun 2014 — Oct 2015

    2K Games QA

    • Found functional issues and regression-tested fixes for multiple titles. Primarily worked on Evolve in coordination with Turtle Rock Studios.
  9. B.S. Economics

    2014

    Washington State University, Pullman

03 About

Tim Smith holding out a cracker to a group of eager deer in a sunny park.

I design the systems that keep players engaged for the long term, and I bring a tester's instincts to all of it.

I'm a tenured QA professional with experience leading teams through technical challenges and delivering impactful features.

Games have evolved into spaces where players can build communities, and I enjoy crafting features that encourage their investment. My work has focused on reward systems, progression frameworks and storefronts, as well as building the automation that lets features ship faster and stay healthy in a live game.

I enjoy breaking things, building teams, and doing inspiring work with passionate people. With a thorough background in QA and project management spanning traditional console, mobile, and streaming platforms, I'm confident that I can provide a unique perspective and level up your organization.

Based in
Seattle, WA
In games since
2014
Favorite games
  • Star Fox 64
  • FEZ
  • Disco Elysium
Now playing
  • Control: Resonant

04 Skills

Skill tree

Specialties

  • Reward systems
  • Progression frameworks
  • Vendors & storefronts
  • Economy & pricing
  • Live-ops scheduling
  • Data-driven automation
  • Test strategy & planning
  • Platform certification
  • Team leadership & mentoring
  • Test automation
  • Performance & compatibility
  • Cross-discipline alignment

Technical Capabilities

  • C / C#
  • Python
  • JavaScript / JSON
  • SQL
  • PowerShell / Batch
  • Git
  • Perforce

Production Tools

  • Figma
  • Miro
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Confluence
  • JIRA
  • Google Workspace
  • Microsoft Office

Platform Experience

  • Xbox GDK development
  • Xbox certification
  • PlayStation SDK development
  • PlayStation certification
  • Microsoft Store compliance
  • Epic Games Store compliance
  • Android / iOS testing

05 Contact

Ready for the next challenge.

I'm looking for Designer and Senior Designer roles throughout the US. Let's talk!

I'm looking for Senior and Lead QA roles throughout the US. Let's talk!

06 Side Quests

Side Quests

Personal project2026

Kernel Panic

An addictive cyberpunk typing game. Level up your skills and collect power ups to hack the seven layers of encryption and take down the network.

Download soon