Biographies
Umbra’s employees are an intense, experienced bunch who love being on the cutting edge of 3D graphics and rendering development. We work hard and play hard.
Everyone of our programmers are involved in supporting Umbra thus they will be familiar to many of our partners. All of our coders work on Umbra’s core technology, each one is qualified to give great, quick and detailed support to our clients. Listing everyone’s specialities is a bit misleading as all of our crew works on so many aspects of our technology, but we try to give an rough overview of the various work our crew does.
Umbra’s engineers have worked on and researched pretty much every game engine and rendering pipeline out there since 2000, so we feel safe in saying that very few companies have engineers with such a variety of experience of game engines and middleware in general from projects all over the world. On a daily basis we work with developers across the world.
Technology team
Ari Silvennoinen
Ari leads the future technology research at Umbra. He is also an active participant in computer graphics conferences such as, SIGGRAPH, i3D, EGSR, etc, and spends most of his office hours prototyping new ideas. He also codes some of the very core components of Umbra’s technology.
Hannu Saransaari
Considering Finns love metal which goes along with long hair, Hannu is so far our only long-haired dude. He codes much of hardcore stuff such as the Umbra 3 Optimizer core and is our regular problem solver and resident genius.
Antti Hätälä
Responsible for the Umbra 3 Runtime core and does a lot of the hardcore programming as well as developing new features. Antti handles API design and all kinds of other tricky tasks with aplomb while still keeping his undeniable cool.
Jasin Bushnaief
Jasin has the huge responsibility of managing our technology development and keeping our coders in check. He also looks after Umbra’s support thus he’s the man who makes sure all support cases are taken care of in timely and efficient fashion. Jasin is also our PlayStation 3 tech specialist.
Turkka Äijälä
The office’s best Call of Duty player is a specialist to whom no task is impossible. Turkka is the go to guy when problems arise and he handles various programming tasks such as Umbra’s Gamebryo integration.
Sampo Lappalainen
Mr relaxed looks after Umbra’s release packages and our development infrastructure as well as being our Unreal Engine 3 specialist. Sampo also does technical writing and creates demos for customers as well as solving integration problems at lightspeed. He also likes…fishing.
Otso Mäkinen
Chief Technical Officer Otso is responsible for Umbra’s development and he’s the brains behind Umbra’s technology. Smart dude. In he’s spare time, he’s the CEO of Umbra and runs like the marathon man
Business development & marketing aka the suits
Teppo Soininen
Part of the Umbra programming team in his previous life, Teppo now takes care of business development and sales. He also trys to play the guitar in his country, redneck rock’n roll band! (he does christmas & office parties!) He also surfs.
Farhad Taherazer
Our man in Seattle is responsible for Umbra’s North-American sales and Umbra’s US presence. Farhad also looks after Umbra’s general business development as well as taking care of our conference dealings.
Thomas Puha
Takes care of Umbra’s Public Relations and marketing and helps out Teppo. In his previous life Thomas was a games journalist for nine years, but far more importantly he has won Konami’s official European Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 Media tournament!
