Software Engineer · iOS · AR · AI · Prototyping
Senior iOS and visionOS engineer with 20+ years building Apple-platform products and 30+ self-published apps surpassing 1M+ App Store downloads. Specialist in spatial and augmented-reality experiences using ARKit, RealityKit and custom Metal shaders — currently building a real-time AR video-capture app used on set by VFX supervisors at Pixomondo (Sony). Apple TV App of the Year winner, with delivery across BMW, the Financial Times, Inflection AI's Pi and Joe Wicks' Body Coach.
UK-based, open to contract and permanent roles. contact@chrisdavis.com · LinkedIn · GitHub
Core skills
- Languages & frameworks
- Swift, SwiftUI, Combine, Objective-C, Python, async/await
- Apple platforms
- iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS
- AR / spatial & graphics
- ARKit, RealityKit, Metal (custom entity shaders, full-screen post-processing), photogrammetry
- APIs & data
- REST, GraphQL, API design, data pipelines
- DevOps & cloud
- AWS, Terraform, CI/CD, Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions
- AI & emerging tech
- Generative-AI pipelines, LLM feature integration, serverless orchestration
- Quality & practice
- Automated & UI testing, performance tuning (Instruments), accessibility, technical documentation, stakeholder management
Experience
Pixomondo (Sony) — Senior iOS / visionOS Engineer (Contract)
May 2025 – Present
- Worked on a real-time AR video-capture app for iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro that lets VFX supervisors judge how CG assets sit in a live shot while the crew is still on set — collapsing a feedback loop that previously ran through the edit.
- Engineered custom RealityKit entity shaders and full-screen Metal post-processing — outline passes and emulation of cinema cameras including the Sony Venice — holding 60fps on device, so a supervisor can preview a look without rigging the physical camera.
- Sole-authored the AI generation pipeline behind a Harry Potter location-based experience: guests upload a photo and receive a personalised video of themselves in the wizarding world, generated against supplied reference imagery. Serverless orchestration across Step Functions, Lambda and DynamoDB, provisioned with Terraform, serving thousands of guest generations.
- Migrated a 4-engineer iOS team from GitLab to GitHub and GitHub Flow to GitFlow, replacing a two-hour manual TestFlight release with an automated build on every commit to develop — taking release cadence from ad-hoc to continuous and handing that time back to the team.
- Authored automated PR checks — duplication detection and diff-size limits — adopted across the engineering team, keeping pull requests small and reviews fast.
usTwo — Senior iOS Engineer (Permanent)
Jul 2021 – Feb 2025
- Shipped the iOS app for Inflection AI's Pi in 8 weeks with a team of three — server-side-event token streaming, custom text rendering and a deliberately minimal UI, delivered against daily changes in product direction.
- Built SwiftUI and Combine features (GraphQL-backed) for Joe Wicks' Body Coach, serving tens of thousands of monthly users — instrumented usage metrics and used them to decide what the team built next.
- Delivered iOS engineering on Alphabet, BMW's connected-car fleet app, used by hundreds of thousands of drivers across Europe.
- Partnered with the Financial Times to prototype their next-generation app, demonstrating a cross-platform approach to code re-use — the FT went on to recruit for that skill set after the engagement ended.
- Ran R&D that fed the business: Terraform work became usTwo's company standard for infrastructure as code, and SharePlay research underpinned a pitch to a radio client. Evaluated PassKeys and visionOS as emerging client opportunities.
- Prototyped Sproutiful, an AI-driven gut-health app, from concept to working proof — used afterwards in new-business conversations to demonstrate usTwo's combined iOS and AI capability.
HEXR — Senior iOS Engineer (Freelance)
Jan 2020 – May 2021
- Built the ARKit-guided capture flow for bespoke 3D-printed bike helmets, directing users along a virtual path to film their own head at home. A known-scale marker on the fitting cap gave the photogrammetry pipeline millimetre-accurate metric geometry rather than unscaled shape — the tolerance the helmet is printed to.
- Streamed captured frames into the 3D-reconstruction pipeline and integrated the GraphQL backend, shipping to paying customers who scanned on a phone at home and received a helmet fitted to their own head by post.
Sketch — macOS Engineer (Freelance)
May 2019 – Jan 2020
- Worked on the plugin platform that lets third-party developers extend Sketch, now home to hundreds of community plugins.
- Contributed the design for running plugin execution over XPC in an isolated process — so a crashing plugin could no longer take down a paying designer's app. Worked across Swift, Objective-C and JavaScript; managed delivery and code review through GitHub.
Senior iOS Engineer (Multiple Contracts)
Apr 2013 – Jan 2019
- Delivered products from rapid prototypes to consumer finance apps in Swift, SwiftUI and Objective-C, designing and consuming REST and GraphQL APIs and managing stakeholders through to shipped features.
- Built custom GPU shader effects and bespoke animation systems; profiled and tuned performance with Instruments; established CI/CD, analytics and unit/UI test suites.
Sony Computer Entertainment — Application Developer (Permanent)
Oct 2008 – Dec 2012
- Developed for PlayStation Home, a 3D virtual world on PlayStation 3 with millions of users.
- Worked on the developer toolchain that tens of external studios used to create content and mini-games for that world: C# Windows scene editors for placing and arranging objects in 3D, and an ASP.NET content-management system through which studios uploaded and published content live to PlayStation.
- Worked on the media-feed editor driving in-world billboards. Owned data-pipeline management, encryption and CI systems with extensive automated and manual testing; version control via Perforce.
Education & professional development
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional — in progress
- Advanced UK Amateur Radio (HAM) Licence — in progress
- Self-directed study in patent drafting
More detail on the certifications and patents pages.