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Software engineer, games developer, founder of SiFire Ltd

About

Matt Sijbers

Hello, I'm Matt. I am a software engineer, games developer and founder of SiFire Ltd. I have over 6 years of experience in the software industry, split primarily over two sectors: software solutions and games development.

I love building things and have always had an affinity with technology and so software was a natural career path. Out of university and unsure of the route to take, I decided to start in software support and secured a position at Cash Processing Solutions (CPS). Support offered me a great overview of all aspects of software development as I had to work closely with all departments to satisfy customers. Shortly after joining CPS's support team, I changed roles to a much more solutions focused position in implementation. There I learnt a huge amount about the software life cycle from solution design, development, systems integration, deployment, and much more. This role also required collaborating closely with clients often onsite and abroad.

Once the pandemic hit, I decided to change focus to establishing an indie games company, which has always been a dream of mine. A journey that has proven incredibly fulfilling and immensely challenging. There is a common mantra in the game development world "making games is hard", add on top of that starting a business and you have quite the task on your hands. But despite the challenges we managed to release our first fully featured game, Diceheart, on steam. This journey has had many ups and downs, starting out as just an idea but slowly building up to a legitimate business. The release of a tangible product has made it all worthwhile and even if it ultimately ends up unsustainable I will have achieved what I set out to.

Experience

Games Developer & Founder

SiFire Ltd · 2020 – Now

Designed, developed and published a fully featured indie game requiring a variety of skills and determination. Set up all the required infrastructure from the ground up, providing development tools to our team and online services like data collection allowing for data driven design. Set up and managed a business, acquiring licenses, managing finances and marketing.

Implementation Specialist

Cash Processing Solution Ltd · 2018 – 2020

Implementing bespoke software solutions, creating and maintaining solution designs (including architecture), leading client facing design workshops, supporting client test cycles, etc. In addition to this role I lead several smaller software projects, from design to full deployment and continual service improvement.

Software Support Specialist (3rd line)

Cash Processing Solution Ltd · 2017 – 2018

Provided 3rd line support for a suite of software solutions, provided both as products and services, to banks, CITs and other financial institutes. From legacy desktop clients to web apps and services.

BSc Computer Science Student

University of Surrey · 2012 – 2016

Subjects: Computer Networking, Software Engineering, Parallel Computing, Data structures and Algorithms, OO Programming, Web Applications Development, Computational Intelligence and Mainframe Computing.

A Levels

Queen Mary's College · 2010 – 2012

A Level: Electronics, Maths, Physics
AS Level: Chemistry
NCFE L2: Digital Imagery

Skills

A non-exhaustive snapshot — happy to chat about any of these, or anything not listed.

Key skills

  • Software development
  • Software implementation
  • System integration
  • Project management
  • UI & UX
  • Infrastructure
  • Networking

Languages

  • C# / .NET
  • TypeScript
  • HTML, CSS/SCSS
  • SQL
  • Python
  • PHP
  • C++

Tools

  • Unity
  • Visual Studio
  • VS Code
  • Git
  • Docker
  • SQL Server

Systems

  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Astro
  • Directus
  • Caddy

Projects

Brass & Sigil Launcher

2025

A private custom Minecraft Java Edition launcher built for distributing a personal modpack (Create, aeronautics, tech and magic, with Distant Horizons) to a small friend group. Built in C# / .NET 8 / Avalonia, ships as a single self-contained Windows executable.

C# / .NET 8AvaloniaCmlLib.CoreSingle-file Windows

Diceheart

2024

A roguelite dungeon-crawler with turn-based tactical dice battles, inspired by Slay the Spire, the Mother series, and Dungeons & Dragons. Built with a small team during the pandemic and shipped on Steam — my first fully featured indie game release.

UnityC#Steam

Self-hosted dev infrastructure

2024

Setting up an indie games company on a budget meant self-hosting all our sites, databases, Git repos and APIs. Built on the LAMP stack on recycled hardware, with redundancy and offsite backups to keep it reliable, plus automation to keep maintenance out of the development path.

UbuntuDockerCaddyPostgresGitea

Client projects at CPS

2019

Worked with a number of clients on a variety of projects at Cash Processing Solutions, the largest being a central bank — replacing their process management software and integrating it with their existing systems. Travelled internationally for design workshops, integration work and training.

Solution designIntegrationTraining

Internal projects at CPS

2019

Alongside my main role at CPS I led a project to replace their service desk software, which expanded in scope to include their DevOps process management. Also contributed to their auto-deployment scripts and automation test suite.

DevOpsTest automation

Other small projects

2020

Web scraping with Selenium for data-driven design. A small research project on generative adversarial neural networks. A service integrating remote smart assistant commands to control devices at home.

PythonSeleniumML

Contact

Drop me a message below, or reach me directly by email or LinkedIn.