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Director Game Creation Operations

Director Game Creation Operations

The Challenge Ahead

This is a key operational leadership role in the Game Development & Infrastructure Services (GDIS) team and offers a recognized expert the opportunity to provide leading services and support for a variety of enterprise-level solutions in support of Application Lifecycle Management for EA’s video game studios and central services teams. The core mission will focus on supporting and operating a game creation platform that will integrate the many applications and tools required to develop video games into a tightly integrated platform, delivering an exceptional experience for EA's game creators. The game creation platform is a critical set of tools and applications used by thousands of users in EA’s game teams to enable the development of key game titles. High levels of platform and application reliability and availability are critically important, along with strong services and support to provide rapid response and resolution to any game team need or issue related to the platform. The game creation platform is built upon a cloud-first philosophy and leverages public cloud services from leading providers such as Azure, AWS and Google, so the ideal candidate will have a strong operational knowledge of running key services in the public cloud. The candidate will also have a strong knowledge of DevOps and SRE principles and practices, closely partnering with the Agile development teams to ensure that the Game Creation services team is an integral part of the development and continuous delivery and release pipeline.

About Game Creation Operations (GCO)

GCO maintains and enhances the Game Creation Platform and its product suite used by all game creation teams across EA. These applications include Source Control, Bug Tracking, Test Case Management, Continuous integration and Code Reviews. GCO is fully integrated in a DevOps model where product management, development, operations, vendors and customer service are tightly woven. GCO adheres to a Service Centric culture, where we listen closely to our customers, develop rapidly, report, iterate, and resolve items together quickly, in an Agile environment. EA game development activities occur globally, 24 hours 7 days a week, therefore our products and services are purpose built to be always available. A critical piece of this service is to monitor closely, optimize and ensure the ecosystem is resilient and performant, operating with high levels of system and service availability. As it relates to providing service for our applications, ownership of the outcome is critical to our customer experience. GCO will own items through the entire service life cycle, regardless of which team may be doing the work, to ensure there is always timely status, transparency and quality communication. It is our mission and core value to provide a superior customer experience, so much so that our emphasis is not on volumes of tickets or request resolution, but instead on how happy our customers are with the service and the quality of the interactions we have with them. While technical skills of our engineers are important to us, we believe that customer service skills, attitude and aptitude are a key to success. Paramount to this is a workplace culture where team members have the opportunity to grow, learn and innovate. We do this through establishing personal development roadmaps, upfront succession plans, celebrating successes, offering a safe place for failure, encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit and offering an inclusive environment.

Position Summary

The Game Development & Infrastructure Services (GDIS) team is seeking a Director of Game Creation Operations to lead the transformation of a service and operations organization that provides global support for a portfolio of applications, products, solutions, and tooling. The Director of Ga me Creation Operations will lead direction, innovation, and strategy for software support throughout the enterprise servicing the creation of EA’s video game portfolio. This includes the development, deployment, and operations of custom software, packaged applications, and tools/metrics that provide insight to the effectiveness and performance of these applications. This leader will be expected to drive operational excellence and define roadmaps in partnership with studios and product management that drive continuous operational and service improvement. Customer and partner satisfaction is critical, so a focus is to continue to build and foster a collaborative “One Team” service centric culture. Building a platform of service and product focused insights and data that drive continuous improvement in service and the quality of the experience of users of the Game Creation platform.

To be successful, the candidate will have an established track record of supporting enterprise-scale application platforms, leverage solid business judgment, excellent communication skills, and have the ability to execute and deliver in a quickly evolving environment. The candidate is expected to coach and mentor existing team members, create learning and develop programs, retain top-tier talent, drive recruiting, and build operations engineers and subject matter pipelines. Finally, the ideal candidate will be a leader and activist in building a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Responsibilities

• Lead an organization that provides 24x7 operational support for EA’s internal game title development products EA-wide
• Provide DevOps leadership to drive maturity and capability improvement in the development, continuous integration and delivery pipelines that support EA’s Game Creation Platform
• Be a champion for continuous service improvement and for achieving application availability and reliability goals for the Game Creation Platform
• Evolve incident and problem management processes and procedures, leveraging ITSM and ITIL frameworks, in close partnership with IT’s Central Operations team
• Collaborate with studio and central teams to develop both short- and long-range strategic product support solutions
• Envision, develop and progress service and operation roadmaps for game creation platform products
• Provide service model guidance on incorporating design, usability and user experience principles for product development, in partnership with EA IT’s Product Management and UX Design teams
• Ensure that all solutions are appropriately provisioned to incorporate modern telemetry and monitoring stacks providing logging, alerting and predictive/post analytic capabilities, supporting continual service improvement
• Continually review the support needs of game development functions relative to new technological developments and trends and keep abreast of industry and emerging technology
• Focus on building a strong support leadership team, with a healthy mix of operation management, service delivery, strategy, and innovation
• Partner with EA’s security leadership to build repeatable systems that implement secure best practices
• Work closely with operations teams, internal customers, and management both formally and informally to track timelines, manage priorities and schedules, and set customer/user expectations
• As part of the product team model, deeply collaborate with customer success, engineering services and product management leaders to identify and execute on continual service improvement opportunities
• Understand complex support, game development and business problems and apply operational and product portfolio knowledge to solve customer problems in a consultative manner
• Manage budgeting and proposal efforts by ensuring completion of project business cases, cost-benefit analyses, resource plans, and project schedules
• Verify areas of responsibility are operating within budget by monitoring labor, software, and hardware costs across all projects and activities
• Provide regular direction, coaching, and guidance to the team for strategic, project, and operational efforts
• Inspire team to exceed expectations, encourage employee growth through professional development, groom team member capabilities via active coaching, and identify skill/ability mismatches
• Attract, recruit, and retain a team that elevates our products and services across the IT team

Qualifications

• 10+ years in a technology leadership position with a proven track record of leading IT teams, large complex IT projects, and managing IT infrastructure.
• 10+ years of experience providing customer centric support for a 24x7 global, complex, large-scale, enterprise application platforms
• Extensive DevOps and operational experience, including associated standards, policies, and frameworks, related to enterprise scale applications and systems
• Experience in support of cloud-based architectures, delivery models, applications, APIs, web services, IaaS, PaaS, microservices, container-based and serverless architectures
• Professional certifications in ITIL and COBIT 5 ideal; other industry specific certifications (i.e. AWS or Azure Cloud, DRP/BCP, relevant vendor certifications) preferred
• Expertise working on a team with motivated cross-functional individuals focused on a common goal of delivering innovative solutions to meet aggressive business demands in an ever-changing environment to achieve on-time and on budget completion of projects
• Experience in planning and managing IT budgets, project management, vendor management, talent management, and team leadership.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with ability to relate complex information to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Demonstrated ability to articulate complex technical themes to executives and senior leaders
• Ability to manage time and juggle multiple priorities to execute high quality deliverables
• Experience working in a fast-paced and highly cross-functional organization

Desired Characteristics

• Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field strongly preferred
• Careful listener with an approach that is inclusive of other viewpoints and perspectives; confidence to make tough decisions about difficult issues with limited data
• Culture carrier with strong leadership skills to drive, deliver, develop, and inspire
• Experience in rapidly changing organizations and the ability to consistently work well with others and provide a supportive attitude for all colleagues
• A career path that demonstrates increasing levels of responsibility and proven success delivering measurable marketing results
• IT Operations background with previous software development experience in gaming, media, and entertainment

We Thought You Might Also Want to Know

We love to brag about our great perks like comprehensive health and benefit packages; and of course, free video games. And since we realize it takes world-class people to make world-class games, we offer competitive compensation packages and a culture that thrives from creativity and individuality. At EA, we live the “work hard/play hard” credo every day.

Don’t Just Play It – Create It!

It’s not easy building the world’s best digital playground. It’s hair-standing-on-end exhilarating. It’s down-in-the-trenches challenging. It’s stroke-of-brilliance-at-midnight creative. It’s you—taking risks, challenging yourself, pursuing ideas, changing the way millions of people do something they love: play. In an industry that’s changing every day, EA is positioned for growth thanks to smart business plans, strategic acquisitions, and most importantly, our creative people around the world who gather each day to unite the world through play. We take that last part very seriously, so if what you’re reading excites you as much as it does us, apply today.