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Technical Lead, Database Team

Job Title:

Requisition ID:

Job Description:

Would you get excited about creating reliable and scalable online services and features, to be used by millions of players all around the world?

Demonware is an independently-run part of Activision Blizzard. We run every part of the players' online experience, from logging in to matchmaking to climbing the leaderboards, for popular video game franchises such as Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot and Skylanders.

Our services impact almost half a billion players, we solve big company challenges with a small company feel.

About This Role:

You would be leading the Database team, who are currently responsible for providing a standard database platform for service teams to use. We develop libraries and tooling that allow service teams to manage their MySQL database fleet, and provide core services to allow them to achieve zero downtime in their data layer. We deal with the difficult challenge of making database management and development easier for our colleagues and customers in Demonware and elsewhere in Activision. We have a set of legacy tooling, but are currently adopting Vitess to eventually replace it, and we plan to expand to support other database technologies in future (Cassandra, Redis).

This position offers the opportunity to work as part of a multi-functional team. You will be working with other excellent development and operations engineers on highly challenging problems. You will be included in the on-call rota for technology that the team is responsible for. As well as building large scale systems, we expect technical leaders to be able to mentor and grow others in the organisation, so we are looking for someone who enjoys engineering challenges and the opportunity to pass on that experience to others.

Day to Day:

• Work closely as a partner to Demonware service teams to design reliable, scalable online services and multiplayer experiences that meet the studios’ requirements and expectations.
• Work closely with service team engineers to solve problems with our database layer
• Handle critical issues, helping to resolve problems and remove roadblocks
• Guide and facilitate design and decision making around Demonware’s database tech stack
• Ensure the team's engineering process works effectively and supports the pace and needs of the project
• Ensure the software produced by the team achieves the quality bar expected for our services by both Demonware and game studios
• Organize and coordinate team members to effectively work on features together and with other teams in Demonware
• Own, operate and support the services and features the team develops
• Provide technical mentorship to team members through engineering standard methodologies
• Collaborate with the team project manager to map out and deliver team objectives and priorities for the year based on company goals and game release timelines

What Demonware Offers:

Relocation support, 25 days of vacation and 3 bonus days in December, Free Activision Games, Flexible working practices, Pension, top-tier medical, dental and life insurance coverage for you and your dependents. To read more: https://demonware.net/careers

Player Profile:

• 3+ years of experience in similar technical leadership role (other combinations of technical skills and experience may be considered)
• Strong background in software engineering or site reliability engineering
• Previous experience building and leading impactful engineering teams
• Initiative and ability to complete complex tasks with minimal supervision
• Experience working at scale - hundreds or thousands of servers
• Good understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle including, but not limited to, agile software development methodology (Scrum or Kanban).
• Experience with and deep understanding of at least one major database: MySQL, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, etc.
• Experience with SQL (or other) database design
• Solid understanding of fundamental technologies, e.g. TCP/IP, Linux/Unix internals
• Demonstrable capacity for an investigative approach and keen to learn new technologies
• Demonstrated excellence in communicating within and across teams
• Excellent problem solving and analytical skills
• Excellent communication skills

Bonus XP

• Background in Database Engineering
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar platforms
• Experience with configuration management systems, e.g. Puppet, Chef, Ansible
• Experience in monitoring and metrics systems, e.g. Nagios, Zabbix, Graphite, Cacti
• Experience working with public cloud providers and cloud technologies