Ulas Karademir Underviser

CTO
IO Interactive

Ulas Karademir is CTO at IO Interactive, the independent Danish studio behind the Hitman series, 007 First Light and the original RPG Project Fantasy. He is responsible for technology strategy and engineering leadership across IOI's studios in Copenhagen, Malmö, Barcelona and Brighton, including the continued evolution of Glacier, the studio's proprietary engine, which now ships across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Nintendo Switch 2 while supporting several large productions in parallel.

His career spans more than twenty-two years in engineering and leadership, and two tenures at IOI. He first joined in 2007 as a tools and platform programmer, went on to lead technical support for the Glacier 2 engine, and became Technical Producer for Hitman and Glacier in 2011. He returned as CTO in 2024.
In the decade between, he spent seven years at Unity, most recently as Vice President of Core Engineering, Graphics, Operations and Productions, and served as General Manager and Chief Product Officer for RealityOS at The TMRW Foundation, alongside a period at Better Collective.

He invests in and advises early-stage games companies through his own company, Karademir ApS, and sits on the advisory board of SuperGears Games.

He speaks on distributed engineering organizations, proprietary engine strategy, dependency and platform risk, and how distributed, multi-studio engineering organizations are actually built, keeping iteration speed high as teams scale.

He is particularly interested in the human side of the technical scale: how tools, data and team structure compound or cancel each other out.
Since 2002, he calls Copenhagen home.