People

Careers

MINE recruits and employs some of the world’s finest engineering talent with deep and extensive domain-specific knowledge and experience for targeted research and innovation engineering, as well as a core engineering and executive staff for providing a world-class development environment.

We are looking for extremely talented and experienced, highly distinguished researchers and engineers who consider joining a start-up company a too-risky step in their professional career but have developed - often brilliant and unrealized - ideas that can fuel the core technology of possible start-up companies.

We are also looking for highly qualified and experienced software engineers and engineering managers who would like to join our project teams and resulting start-ups to bring these new technologies to life.

Subsequent to the successful implementation and validation of a proof-of-concept or prototype for any new technologies, start-up companies are formed. As part of their contracts, researchers and engineers have the option to join their particular start-up company at low personal risk. The core staff remains at MINE. The start-up companies are initially funded by Reality Ventures.

Hiring

We are hiring researchers and engineers with diverse professional backgrounds including computer science, mathematics, physics, software engineering, systems architecture, logic design, web and mobile technologies, experience design, and computer graphics.

Organized in small, interdisciplinary teams, we thrive on our desire to learn from each other and we share our enthusiasm for creating technologies and experiences that matter.

MINE operates and hires worldwide. The company is based in Berlin, Germany, and San Francisco, California.

Your ideas, experience and vision matter to us.

Please contact us indicating your area of expertise and allow us to respond with a formal request for your resume and any additional information we may require.

Management

Rolf Herken

Founder, CEO and CTO of MINE

Rolf Herken is one of the most respected and connected visionaries in the software technology industry, specifically in the computer graphics software component and Cloud platform technology fields, and is widely known for his ability to recognize strategic business opportunities and to find and manage world-class engineering teams in a global environment.
In 1986, he founded the company mental images in Berlin and turned it into the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content, driving the company’s innovative technologies and products since its inception. In 1999, he founded the company incremental images in San Francisco to develop the world’s first cloud-based scalable software platform for interactive 3D content accessible from any device. After selling the subsequently merged companies, he left mental images in 2011 to create MINE and Reality Ventures.

Peter Mehlstaeubler

COO and Managing Director of MINE, Berlin

Peter Mehlstaeubler is an experienced technology executive with a strong track record in the software technology industry. He focuses on connecting innovative technology development with business success and has in-depth experience in building high performance teams in multi-cultural / multi-location environments.
Prior to joining MINE he held various executive and senior leadership positions at Nemetschek, mental images, Alias Systems, ICEM Technologies and Control Data.

Larry Tesler

Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of MINE

Larry Tesler has extensive experience in the computer industry. Before graduating from Stanford University in 1965, he founded a bespoke software company. At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, his research focused on cognitive and linguistic models and document formatting. In the 1970’s, he was a member of the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he introduced cut/copy-paste and other interaction techniques that have become standard in computing.
At Apple from 1980–97, his positions included VP of advanced technology and chief scientist. Then, at Amazon.com, he became the first VP of Shopping Experience. At Yahoo!, he was VP of User Experience and Design. During the four years prior to joining MINE, he was a consultant and advisor to companies in the energy, finance, archival storage, electronics and health care industries.
In 1990, he co-founded ARM, the microprocessor IP company and recruited its first CEO. He served on ARM’s board for thirteen years.
In 2011, the leading professional society for computer-human interaction chose him to receive the SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award in recognition of his influential contributions to the field.

Rebecca Tredway

COO of MINE, San Francisco

Rebecca Tredway has held leading finance positions for entrepreneurial businesses in the software development and entertainment fields, including mental images, Autodesk, Turner Broadcasting, The Walt Disney Company and Arthur Young & Co. In these roles she has managed strategic planning, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, finance, accounting, information systems and developer relations. She has extensive experience developing business structures in start-up companies.

Karen Kuehnert

CFO of MINE

Karen Kuehnert has more than 20 years of financial management experience, working with manufacturing and technology-driven organizations, she has held senior financial positions at mental images, Technicolor, Baker Hughes and West Pharmaceutial Services, with responsibility for financial planning and analysis, treasury, accounting, tax, purchasing and investor relations. Besides having a strong record in managing financial projects and played leadership roles in a number of company-wide initiatives, including various outsourcing projects and the global implementation of ERP systems, she is also experienced with demerging business units and has supported due diligence processes of industrial partners and private equity funds.

Gary Yost

VP Engineering Management of MINE, San Francisco

Gary Yost lead the team that created 3ds Max, the world’s most widely used 3d content creation software. He is known for his pioneering work in the implementation of distributed software engineering — connecting geographically-distributed engineers in a tightly-coupled way. His history of assembling small groups of collaborating engineers has been proven to create efficiencies not seen in conventional engineering management. Being an innovator himself, his supportive engineering management style helps to maintain an environment particularly suited to innovation.

Innovation Engineers

Rolf Berteig

Rolf Berteig has been designing and implementing commercial software in the field of computer graphics and digital content creation for more than two decades. He co-authored Autodesk 3D Studio Max™, the leading 3D modeling, animation and rendering software. Later, at mental images and Nvidia, he served as Chief Software Architect for a distributed software development team that encompassed both North American and European engineers, quality assurance personnel and technical writers.

Donald Brittain

Don Brittain started his career in academia, holding positions in pure mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the State University of New York at Stony Book. He then switched to the field of interactive computer graphics. Initially, Don served as Vice President of Research for Wavefront Technologies, where he received the Outstanding Contribution Award for his groundbreaking work on platform-independent 3D graphics frameworks. He then became one of the original architects of Autodesk 3D Studio Max™. In 2002, Don co-founded Instant Effects and is the architect of that company’s family of real-time production products.

Steve Burnett

Having spent most of his career converting cryptographic algorithms into computer programs, Steve Burnett can best be described as a crypto engineer. First, at RSA Data Security he worked his way up to be technical lead for the BSAFE crypto toolkit, then at Voltage Security he was the technical and project lead for the VIBE toolkit. He is co-author of the book “RSA Security’s Official Guide to Cryptography” and author of other articles, including the popular “Crypto Blunders”.

Brian Calhoun

Brian Calhoun has a passion for creating software that looks like magic. His career began at university when he was creating award-winning animations for sport scoreboards. He spent the early part of his career developing software engineering tools in the area of requirements management and reverse engineering. At Oracle, Brian was part of the team creating Oracle’s source code management system. Brian has worked in software development and management in the online ad industry in San Francisco, at top-tier VC-backed firms and smaller firms as well. Brian has been the CEO of SilverStripe where he grew the company significantly in a brief time as well as created software and server management tools. Brian has also been an entrepreneur, founding a company in the area of personalized recommendations where he created the machine-learning technology behind the recommendations.

Brian Gin

Brian’s entire career started with the birth of the Free-to-Play business model in the USA. He has spent more than 8 years designing, developing, producing, and running operations for various games on different platforms. With the shift from hardcore PC gaming to casual gaming from Facebook, and now to mobile gaming, Brian has taken a step towards breaking free from the entertainment industry and makes his way into technology.

John Harris

Widely known as the Turing Machinist, John Harris is an outspoken technologist bent on creating exceptional user experiences. Since graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 2005, he has held various significant software development positions for a number of companies including Electronic Arts and LINKLINE Communications, Inc. John founded Red Robot Labs in 2011, where he served as CTO. His love of social games, cycling and other metrics-driven tomfoolery keeps him young; coding does the rest.

Jochen Kornitzky

Jochen Kornitzky is a highly skilled software engineer with broad expertise. Before joining MINE, he spent more than two decades creating tools and products at international software companies such as Siemens and mental images. Jochen covers all types of project work, ranging from short-term mission critical tasks to long-term commercial product development. Jochen has in-depth knowledge in the fields of computer graphics and image processing, large-scale high performance cluster computing, cloud computing and network infrastructure. His expertise includes combining lightweight infrastructure design with the needs of geographically distributed research and software development processes.

Alexander Lobodzinski

Alexander Lobodzinski is a renowned systems engineer and expert in setting up highly effective IT environments for technology companies, ranging from small start-ups to market leading technology innovators. He has created scalable infrastructures for globally distributed software development teams with a strong focus on creating business value by safeguarding company IP in an open environment, resulting in no negative impacts from malware attacks. Alexander’s charter within the MINE group of companies is to combine on-premise and cloud-based solutions to meet all specific individual business needs.

James A. McCombe

James is a highly accomplished engineer and entrepreneur in the field of parallel computing, hardware architecture and computer graphics. Prior to joining MINE, James was Founder of Caustic Graphics in 2006, where, as its Chief Technical Officer, he developed algorithms and custom logic to dramatically reduce the power consumption and memory bandwidth requirements for GPU hardware performing “incoherent” database search problems, specifically in the area of ray traced graphics. UK based Imagination Technologies acquired Caustic Graphics in 2010, where James continued to work on the integration of the technology into the PowerVR GPU that is used in many mobile devices, including all of Apple’s mobile products, today. Prior to this, James was a lead software engineer on the mobile and desktop OpenGL graphics system at Apple between 2001 and 2006, where he contributed to the evolution of programmable shading languages for the GPU and developed the low power graphics firmware used in the 5^th generation video iPod which subsequently served as a basis for the surface compositor on the 1^st generation iPhone. Prior to Apple, James developed graphics systems and games for the early mobile devices such as the Palm Pilot. James McCombe holds more than 11 granted patents in the areas of parallel hardware scheduling, numeric representation, and spatial data structure assembly algorithms.

John Phua

John Phua is an experienced executive in establishing international product teams, business development and strategic investments and partnerships for mobile ecosystems, consumer products, online platforms and services. He most recently led the establishment of several international mobile development studios and revenue-generating game publishing businesses in greater Asia at Next Media Animation. At Sony Computer Entertainment America, John led cross discipline teams from business development to R&D in launching the original PlayStation, PlayStation2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation3 and the PlayStation Network in North America. He has successfully brought together the right resources, teams and partnerships for significant product launches.

Hannes Reich

Hannes Reich has a passion for making software developers successful. He is an expert in setting up software development services that support multi-location teams through highly automated build-and-release processes. For more than ten years, he has built production environments for teams of five to 50 engineers for products ranging from embedded systems to web applications. Utilizing state-of-the-art agile principles and configurable tool sets, Hannes is creating a versatile development framework for MINE projects and the 5-stage IP Mining process.

Brian Smith

Brian Smith has spent his career designing and implementing cutting-edge software tools for a wide variety of industries. He began his career working in the R&D department of package carrier UPS before moving to General Dynamics where he developed computer vision tools for autonomous robots. Brian then spent nearly a decade creating hardware-accelerated rendering tools for a number of companies, including ESC Entertainment, Digital Domain, and Industrial Light & Magic. He later was involved in early-stage user interface prototyping for Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor. Prior to coming to MINE, Brian founded Pseudo Studios, a mobile software development company, releasing several top-selling iOS & Android applications.

Attila Vass

Attila Vass’ professional skills and experience range broadly from circuit design to embedded system firmware development – from high-level architecture and application coding to API design and defining standards. His pioneering work in automotive network communications was first featured at Hackers Conferences and in a 2005 article by The New York Times. Attila served as Director of Distributed Systems at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., overseeing R&D for flagship products and emerging technologies (PlayStation2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation3, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation4 and the PlayStation Network). Previously, he was the lead engineer in charge of developing Alias Wavefront’s advanced 3D content authoring tools. After graduating in his native country of Hungary with a degree in Computer Science, he began his career at Microsoft and Sega Enterprises in Japan.