My Portfolio

Hi 👋, I'm Joseph J Helfenbein

🎓 Computer Science & Physics Student @ CCNY


Computer Science & Physics student working on graphics and systems programming in C++ and Vulkan. Building rendering engines from scratch with custom memory allocators, collision systems, and real-time simulation. Also working on CUDA kernel optimization and distributed systems. Previously built real-time esports infrastructure at EA and distributed backend systems at HubSpot. Interested in performance optimization and how hardware architecture influences software design.

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Work Experience

NVIDIA

Incoming Software Engineer Intern

August 2026 - November 2026
DirectX Graphics Driver Performance

Google

Software Engineer Intern

May 2026 - August 2026
High-Performance Networking & Kernel-Bypass Systems

HubSpot

Software Engineer Intern

January 2026 - April 2026
Automation Observability Backend team, built real-time execution streaming, event query, and issue management infrastructure for high-throughput automation workflows

Electronic Arts (EA)

Software Engineer Intern

June 2025 - September 2025
League Operations Esports team, built real-time voice, moderation, and overlay infrastructure for large-scale Apex Legends tournaments

AuriStor, Inc.

Software Engineer Intern

March 2025 - May 2025
Developed distributed filesystem automation and observability tooling for secure AuriStorFS deployments

Projects

Rind

November 2025 - June 2026

GitHub
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Steam

A robot shooter game and the custom C++/Vulkan engine it runs on. The engine is a deferred PBR renderer with a multi-queue asynchronous render graph, featuring spherical-harmonic global illumination, PCSS soft shadows, screen-space reflections, and ray-marched volumetrics, with CPU hot paths accelerated by multi-target ISPC SIMD kernels, a spatial hash grid for colliders, and a thread pool. It runs cross-platform on Windows, macOS (via MoltenVK), and Linux, and additionally ships as a reusable engine library.

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NeuroPBR

October 2025 - December 2025

GitHub

Converts three iPhone photos into PBR materials, powered by a fully GPU-accelerated pipeline. It uses a custom CUDA renderer for synthetic training data, a multi-view ResNet50/ViT-UNet teacher model for detailed material reconstruction, and a distilled FP16 MobileNetV3/ViT-UNet student optimized for the Apple Neural Engine. The iOS app delivers real-time on-device inference with a Metal real-time 3D previewer.

NeuroPBR preview

GustGrid-Vulkan

June 2025 - August 2025

GitHub

A real-time visualization tool of PC airflow and thermal dynamics re-engineered with C++ and Vulkan. This Vulkan port replaces the original OpenGL renderer and translates all CUDA kernels into Vulkan compute shaders, running cross-platform on macOS (via MoltenVK), Linux, and Windows across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Apple Silicon GPUs.

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GustGrid

June 2025

GitHub

A real-time visualization tool of PC airflow and thermal dynamics built in C++, OpenGL, and NVIDIA CUDA. It accurately models heat dissipation, fan performance, and airflow patterns within complex computer chassis geometries, and has a graphical interface to adjust component layouts, enabling rapid design iterations.

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Material Viewer

September 2024 - November 2024

GitHub

A 3D desktop application for previewing PBR materials using OpenGL and C++. It features HDRI environments, image-based lighting, and PBR shading. Users can upload individual image textures, custom .mat files, or .zip files for material previewing, and save viewed materials in a custom .mat format for easy sharing.

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Physics Sandbox

June 2024 - July 2024

GitHub
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Link

A rigid body physics engine with simulated cubes and spheres. It has real-time raytraced shadows and a Blinn-Phong shader using WebGL.

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Made by Joseph J Helfenbein. See GitHub repository here.