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Technical Director

WHO WE ARE

We’re ArenaNet—we’ve created a studio that makes online worlds infused with innovation, hand-crafted excellence, and creative passion. We're not the only ones who share this passion; gamers made Guild Wars 2 the fastest selling MMO game in the West with more than 3 million copies sold in its first 9 months continuing to over 16 million accounts today, and players and press have consistently called it one of the best MMOs of all time.

Our studio is built on foundations of excellence with a focus on community. We constantly innovate, unlocking the true potential of online role-playing with game-changing titles like Guild Wars 2 and beyond. The status quo is not good enough for our dedicated worldwide community of players, which is why we question the de facto industry conventions.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

As the Technical Director for Guild Wars 2, you will work with our teams to improve our toolsets and provide friendlier, faster, and more creative conversion of our game ideas into shippable, playable content. You’ll bring your own experience as well as harvesting the experience of our teams to help Guild Wars 2 continue to deliver exciting content well into the future with increasing efficiency.

Integrate into leadership team and help develop and align project strategy. Recruit, nurture and retain a product engineering organization with the skills, capacity, and adaptability to navigate uncertainty and deliver on the changing needs of the project. Manage multiple engineering leads, providing technical guidance, management support, constructive feedback, and career development coaching. Build trust and direct engineering to tackle challenging problems while sensibly managing technology risks. Work and set technical strategic vision & direction from a long-term perspective, not singularly focusing on the next milestone or current hot topic.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL

• Significant experience in online game development
• Proactively anticipate and solve problems
• Collaborate & communicate creatively with all disciplines to provide technology fulfilling the creative vision
• A willingness to adopt, contribute to, and drive our development practices
• Ability to teach and be taught by others
• Experience working with and directing offsite teams
• Experience working across multiple project subsystems
• Familiarity with multiple programming languages, and expertise in one or more OO languages
• Deep understanding of object-oriented patterns
• Experience in automation and procedural generation
• Ability to travel on an as needed basis
• Self-motivated, and able to work with minimal direct supervision

BONUS EXPERIENCE

Guild Wars 2 has a very mature technology stack in terms of online gameplay, with latency friendly networking stacks that allow players to play together from around the world. While we are unlikely to change the underlying software stack, experience with the following technologies would be beneficial:

• Experience with full stack network programming
• Socket programming for realtime multiplayer games
• SQL and noSQL based systems development
• Expert knowledge of concurrency paradigms
• Containerization and auto-scaling technologies
• Authority on RESTful interface design

This position is based out of our Bellevue, WA office. Due to COVID-19 we have temporarily transitioned to a work from home model, but anticipate returning to the office in the coming months on a hybrid basis.