Luke Rajlich

2012 Young Alumni Achievement Award

In 2007, Luke Rajlich (BS '05) left a lucrative job in the financial services industry, where he worked in high frequency trading at Citadel Investment Group, to reunite with his Illinois classmates and help start, MyMiniLife, Inc.

At Zynga, Rajlich served as chief technology officer of FarmVille, where he was responsible for the game’s engineering, operations, and scaling. Also at Zynga, he started a content management team to build tools that reduce the cost of producing new game content. These tools are widely adopted within Zynga and are the company’s standard content management tools.

Today, Rajlich is a distinguished engineer at Zynga, and he is the studio’s CTO of an unreleased mobile game. He was recently named as one of Fortune Magazine’s "50 Smartest People in Technology."