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Software Engineer Co-op [Sep 2023]

The job

This co-op position is open to current students at Canadian educational institutions. We’re working remotely across Canada, and we’ll supply the equipment you need to do your work.

As a Software Development Engineer Co-op, you will be helping build our live mobile games, as well as the tools and infrastructure needed to run these massively multiplayer online experiences. You will work closely with artists and designers to grow our games from the population of a city to the population of an entire country. You will design services used by a large number of concurrent users, and implement scalable, reliable and maintainable technologies for both client and server. You will have a major impact on the end product, and will be involved in every aspect of its development. Millions of people will use what you create.

What you will do

You will be responsible for implementing features, systems, and tools for our games in live operation. The game backends are built with a Django + MySQL server architecture, while the frontend clients are built using Unity or native iOS/Android depending on the product. You will also:

• Build entire features from front-end client code to back-end server support. Many of our engineers are full stack!
• Become involved in every aspect of product development, from design to implementation to playtests to metrics analysis.
• Construct systems that let everyone at the company deploy to our distributed backend without worry.
• Create tools to automate and optimize processes across disciplines. These might be adding additional player management tools for our community team, data pipeline optimizations for our game designers, or even content pipelines for our art team.

Who we are looking for

• You are a tech generalist, a full stack engineer with the desire to work on both client and server side implementations of entire features.
• You have a strong understanding of object-oriented design, data structures and algorithms.
• You communicate your thoughts and ideas clearly in code and in writing
• You have an interest in and play mobile gaming products.

Past co-ops have worked on..

• Guild management improvements like the ability to invite people, open clubs that players can join without approval, better club search, and other tools to keep our most active players engaged.
• Revamped data deploy tool to enable multiple game designers to work simultaneously.
• Setup metrics tracking and funnel analysis and experimented with different UI polishes to improve retention.
• Worked on upgrading our data pipeline: processing data and creating different data representations and visualizations to help ATA to make marketing and product decisions.
• Implemented the entire stack for our Second Builder subscription purchase, which included interfacing with both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, as well as client support.
• Optimized particle systems in-game to significantly reduce peak memory usage.

Interview process

1. Resume + screening questions review
2. Two 30-minute technical interviews over Zoom, back to back with our engineers - expect to write code!
3. 30-minute Team Fit interview over Zoom
4. Offer

About us:

A Thinking Ape is fully committed to diversity and inclusion; of our new hires in 2021, 49% were women or non-binary. We released our first game in 2009, and have been profitable ever since. Our teams are friendly, open to challenging themselves and everyone's ideas are heard.

Our commitment to inclusion

We build communities. To do this to the best of our abilities, we need a workforce that reflects the diverse player communities we serve. We believe a variety of perspectives and experiences allows us to make better decisions and understand the needs of our players. We work hard to create an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work and feel like they belong at ATA.