Samuel Hunt

Full-stack developer with 4+ years of professional experience spanning web applications, desktop software, Machine Learning tooling, and systems programming. Passionate about building performant, reliable software across the stack.

+64 21 088 31298
samuelhuntnz@gmail.com
Manawatu, New Zealand

Skills

Rust
Javascript / Typescript
React / Next.js
Node.js
React Native
Go
SQL
Python

Experience

Elefant AI — Software Developer, Full-time (May 2024 – Present)
  • Built tools in Rust for capturing gameplay footage and player inputs used to train vision-based game-playing models.
  • Integrated local Machine Learning model inference with live games, allowing trained models to directly play in real time.
  • Built Player2, a Tauri desktop app for an AI gaming platform enabling AI-powered mods and NPC experiences.
  • Contributed across the full stack as needed, including the Next.js web application, Go backend services, and gRPC APIs.
  • Tech: Rust, TypeScript/React, Next.js, Go
Hello Cashflow — Software Developer, Contract (Mar 2022 – May 2024)
  • Full-stack developer building accounting software to visualise Xero and QuickBooks data.
  • Tech: React, Node.js/TypeScript

Publications

Scaling Behavior Cloning Improves Causal Reasoning: An Open Model for Real-Time Video Game Playing (Jan 2026)
Yuguang Yue, Irakli Salia, Samuel Hunt, Christopher Green, Wenzhe Shi, Jonathan J Hunt
ICML 2026 Conference Submission OpenReview

Learning to Play: A Multimodal Agent for 3D Game-Play (Oct 2025)
Yuguang Yue, Irakli Salia, Samuel Hunt, Christopher Green, Wenzhe Shi, Jonathan J Hunt
ICCV 2025 Workshop MMRAgI OpenReview

Generalizing Across Worlds: 3D Video Games as a Challenge for Embodied Intelligence (Sep 2025)
Yuguang Yue, Irakli Salia, Samuel Hunt, Christopher Green, Wenzhe Shi, Jonathan J Hunt
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop EWM OpenReview

Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D Gameplay (Aug 2025)
Yuguang Yue, Christopher Green, Samuel Hunt, Irakli Salia, Wenzhe Shi, Jonathan J Hunt
2025 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) OpenReview

Personal Projects

Scrap github.com/n1ght-hunter/scrap
A programming language written from scratch in Rust, targeting Rust-like memory safety with Go-like developer speed.

rtmalloc github.com/n1ght-hunter/rtmalloc
A thread-caching malloc implementation in Rust based on tcmalloc design. Built to make thread-caching allocators accessible in Rust without C tooling.

Igloo github.com/n1ght-hunter/igloo
An Iced GUI plugin system using WASM, enabling plugins written in any WIT-supported language.

iced_video github.com/n1ght-hunter/iced_video
A video playback widget for the Iced GUI framework.

winit_tray github.com/n1ght-hunter/winit_tray
System tray icon support for winit.

Open Source Contributions

iced iced-rs/iced
Multiple contributions including window decorations, slider rail styling, window actions, and icon management.

wild linker wild-linker/wild
Working on Windows target support for the Rust linker.

wgpu gfx-rs/wgpu
Added DComp swapchain support for the DX12 backend to simplify transparency.

burn tracel-ai/burn
Improved burn-import code generation output formatting.

tauri tauri-apps/tauri
Added Builder::on_device_event for device event handling.

Minor Contributions

bevy_editor_prototypes, tauri-specta, rules_rust, Blenvy