Las Vegas, Nevada

Mitchell Czaja

Systems engineer by day. Game developer by night.

I keep the networks, phones and Microsoft 365 tenants of 75+ businesses running at a managed service provider. After hours I make games: a co-op horror game headed to Steam under my own studio, and the occasional RimWorld mod when my server needs fixing.

View resume Email me LinkedIn

01Professional work

Five years inside managed service providers: owning escalations end to end, and turning one-off fixes into runbooks the rest of the team actually uses.

75+clients supported
~2,500managed endpoints
100+VoIP deployments
#2company-wide in IT Glue docs
Aug 2022 – present
Healthy Technology Solutions
Las Vegas, NV

MSP Systems Engineer · VoIP & Cloud

  • L1/L2 support for 75+ clients and ~2,500 endpoints through ConnectWise Manage, ScreenConnect and Datto RMM: patching, monitoring, scripted remediation and proactive alerting.
  • 100+ VoIP rollouts on Intermedia Elevate, Teams Voice, RingCentral and FortiVoice, from small offices to large call centers: SIP, auto-attendants, hunt groups, QoS.
  • Own 10DLC / SMS compliance: brand and campaign registration with The Campaign Registry, carrier approvals, ongoing upkeep.
  • Administer Microsoft 365, Entra ID and Azure across tenants (identity lifecycle, Conditional Access, licensing, hybrid identity), with CIPP for multi-tenant automation and standards.
  • Run ThreatLocker allowlisting on every managed endpoint alongside Datto EDR, Huntress, Defender and Petra; design phishing simulations and follow-up training for 20+ organizations.
Mar 2021 – Aug 2022
Brydan Solutions (MSP)
Las Vegas, NV

Network and Systems Administrator

  • Designed and single-handedly deployed a 1,000+ agent SentinelOne EDR rollout, then handled detections and wrote incident reports.
  • Spearheaded a Splunk SIEM deployment for centralized logging, alerting and dashboards.
  • Built SMB networks on Fortinet, Ubiquiti and Meraki: VPN tunnels, DMZ segmentation, firewall policy.
  • Supported Windows Server estates (AD, GPO, Exchange, DNS, DHCP, SQL, IIS) for ~100 companies of up to 300 endpoints each.
  • Top ticket resolver on the team, averaging ~8% above the next engineer over ten months.
Education

Information Technology & Computer Programming
College of Southern Nevada, 2019 – 2021

Certifications in progress

MS-102 Microsoft 365 Administrator Expert
CompTIA Network+

02Dev work

Games and the tools I build to make them, mostly after the tickets are closed.

Grinner's Diner key art
A game by Distant Neon Games, my studio
Steam Early Access · Oct 26, 2026

Grinner's Diner

A co-op horror cooking game for 2 to 4 players. Run a roadside diner in the Appalachian hills, keep the grill going, and figure out which late-night customers aren't human.

Design, code, models, audio direction and marketing: I founded Distant Neon Games to ship it.

  • Unity
  • C#
  • Netcode for GameObjects
  • Steamworks
  • Blender
Wishlist on Steam → Game site → Studio →
Game prototype

The Marks

A two-player co-op craps roguelike at a smoky casino table. Server-authoritative bets and dice, a shared upgrade economy, and late-join recovery, all over Steam networking.

  • Unity
  • C#
  • Netcode
  • Steam P2P
Tool

Procedural trailer engine

Grinner's Diner's teaser trailer was rendered from code: a deterministic three.js scene with seeded noise and a scripted timeline, exported frame by frame to video so every cut is reproducible.

  • three.js
  • JavaScript
  • FFmpeg

03RimWorld modding

I host a RimWorld multiplayer server with Combat Extended. It kept desyncing, so I treated it like any other outage: find the root cause, fix it, write it up.

CE Multiplayer Desync Fix

A standalone compatibility mod that makes Combat Extended (and Vanilla Furniture Expanded: Props) deterministic under RimWorld Multiplayer. Three separate root causes, three targeted Harmony patches.

Root cause 1

Smoke on background threads

CE ticked black smoke with a parallel loop, so worker threads pulled from the game's seeded RNG in whatever order the scheduler chose.

Fix: Run smoke ticking sequentially on the main thread in multiplayer, with smoke left on.

Root cause 2

Unsynced mod settings

Settings like melee hunting and opportunistic reload changed the simulation but lived only on each player's machine.

Fix: Register them as Multiplayer sync fields and keep a host-authoritative snapshot in the save.

Root cause 3

Dev Mode changed the economy

Destroyed VFE props refunded silver based on per-player settings, and on whether that player had Dev Mode on.

Fix: Sync the multipliers and remove the Dev Mode branch while in a session.

  • C#
  • Harmony
  • .NET Framework 4.7.2
  • RimWorld 1.6
  • Multiplayer API
Verified against the released CE 1.6 build.

04Toolbox

The stack I work in every day, plus the one I play in at night.

Microsoft 365 & Azure

  • Exchange Online
  • Intune
  • Entra ID
  • Conditional Access
  • SharePoint
  • Teams
  • CIPP
  • Hybrid AD

VoIP & messaging

  • Intermedia Elevate
  • Teams Voice
  • RingCentral
  • FortiVoice
  • SIP
  • QoS
  • 10DLC / TCR

Security & EDR

  • ThreatLocker
  • SentinelOne
  • Huntress
  • Datto EDR
  • Splunk
  • Ironscales
  • BitLocker

Networking & servers

  • Fortinet
  • Unifi
  • Meraki
  • MikroTik
  • VLANs / VPN
  • Windows Server
  • AD / GPO
  • ESXi

MSP tooling

  • ConnectWise Manage
  • ScreenConnect
  • Datto RMM
  • IT Glue
  • Veeam
  • Datto BCDR

Code & game dev

  • C#
  • Python
  • PowerShell
  • SQL
  • Unity
  • Blender
  • three.js
  • Claude
Home lab

FortiGate firewall with an isolated IoT VLAN and VPN tunnel, Unifi APs and managed switches, an ESXi host running Windows Server and Ubuntu VMs, and an all-in-one Splunk instance fed by FortiGate syslog and universal forwarders.

Hiring, collaborating, or just want to talk shop?

I'm open to systems and network engineering roles in Las Vegas and the Greater Los Angeles area, and always happy to talk games.

Emailme@mitchellczaja.com LinkedInin/mitchellczaja ResumeView or download PDF Studiodistantneon.com