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Sr. Technical Director

At Maxis, we excel at outrageous thinking. It’s the fuel that inspires the best games in the world. We’re trailblazers and great storytellers. But it’s not just about amazing your peers – it’s about amazing yourself and our fans. Take risks. Work with dazzling minds and dare to dream big. Together, we can change the way millions play every day.

Role Expectations

• Lead the technology strategy, development and live operations of Project Dolores by working with the GM, Tech Art Director, TDs, Creative director & engineers.
• Partner with engineering people managers to guide and nurture growth of engineers in the team.
• Partner with the game’s Technical Leadership group to define and implement strategic goals and milestones, establish best practices, and promote the core development values of the engineering team.
• Work with Production, Development Directors, and other disciplines leads to scope tasks and input requirements.
• Work with EA central teams to adopt shared technology and influence their roadmaps with Dolores’ needs.
• Create and adjust technical decisions and roadmap priorities for the game, using your technical expertise to draw out not only the WHAT & WHEN, but the WHY for the roadmap.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to the engineering team.
• Be a hands-on participant in architecture/design for our hardest technical challenges.
• Review completed engineering deliverables before release.
• Collaborate with broader team partners (design, art, XD, and so on) to ensure that engineering interests and values are represented and maintained through the course of development, and that features are being developed with Tech capabilities and performance limitations in mind.
• Identify, manage, and drive to completion, risks and mitigations for the various game systems and backend services on the project.
• Perform research to acquire new knowledge necessary to perform assigned tasks and maintain the technological evolution of the project.
• Gain depth of knowledge of The Sims and EA's current game technology.
• Own the hiring process for the game’s engineering team by identifying skill gaps and work with talent acquisition and people managers to find and recruit candidates.

You have

• 10+ years of professional experience as a software engineer shipping games.
• 5+ years of experience leading a team of software engineers (10+) as a TD or lead engineer to architect, develop and live service mobile or cross-platform games.
• Shipped 3-5 mid-size to AAA games as a TD (majority on mobile platforms is a +). At least one of them is/was in active live service.
• Experience with performance analysis and code optimization.
• Experience collaborating with producers, artists, designers, project managers and other engineers.
• Experience with large scale software technical architecture and design.
• Experience with productive and critical conversations with high performing and low performing engineers in the team.
• Experience with long term career mentorship of software engineers with varying levels of experience.
• Experience with at least one major cloud infrastructure solution (e.g. Amazon, Azure, Google.)
• Expert in at least one of the following domains, and some experience with the other two:
• Gameplay/simulation systems/stats driven gameplay system development.
• Client/Server architecture & data model design for data-driven experimentation driven game systems.
• Rendering/3D asset pipelines/game creation tools.

Bonus:

• Experience working with simulation games.
• Proficiency in Unity.
• Interested in and/or experienced with Machine Learning.