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Technical Director - Backend/Server Software Development
3 years ago
Backend/Server Technical Director - MAXIS
At EA, we excel at outrageous thinking. It’s the fuel that inspires the best games in the world. We’re great storytellers. But it’s not just about amazing your peers – it’s about amazing yourself. Take risks. Work with great minds and dare to dream big. Together, we can change the way millions play every day.
Technical Director for Maxis Studios.
Goals
- Lead Maxis’ backend/server team
- Determine and oversee the backend/server technology strategy for Maxis’ games.
- Look ahead for, evaluate and recommend technology choices for building responsive scalable game backend services.
- Conscious of server operating costs. Being aware of the cost of running live servers and experience minimizing those expenses.
- Mentor technical leads on the backend design principles.
- Develop responsive, massively scalable, highly available game servers and services supporting multiple games.
- Creatively blend security best practices and original techniques to keep user data secure and prevent cheating.
- Apply and improve server deployment and troubleshooting strategies that maximize uptime.
- Drive design and implementation of APIs and protocols that are consistent, formalized, and testable.
- Oversee and work with team members (designers, QE, client engineers & production teams) to align service goals & architecture to meet evolving requirements of games in Live Service.
- Mentor other developers, review their work, and make recommendations for improvement.
- Reports to Engineer Leader
Preferred Skills
- A passion for playing and making awesome games!
- A desire to create scalable game servers and services using modern technology for diverse games.
- Experience building large-scale live services for at least one game.
- A respect for accomplished specialists and a healthy level of paranoia to motivate a security-centric approach.
- Understanding of stable change management practices in a live service environment.
- Experience with technical leadership & mentoring a team of versatile (full stack) engineers.
- Expert level programming skills – preference for experienced Java developers, but other languages are welcome too.
- Experience with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine.
- Hands on experience and willingness to create multiple short lived prototypes.
- Broad experience with some of the following:
- Frameworks (e.g. Spring boot)
- Build tools (e.g, Gradle, SBT, Maven)
- Static analysis tools (e.g., Coverity, Sonar, PMD)
- Test frameworks (e.g., JUnit, TestNG, Spring)
- Linux scripting (e.g., Bash, Python, Groovy)
- Social APIs / 3rd Party SDK Integration
- Redis / Memcached data caching solutions
- Kotlin / JVM based languages
- Familiarity with Linux Systems Administration and scripting experience.
- Experience shipping games built with Unreal or Unity is good to have.
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