Technical Director

Job Description

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.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-re3e7g-18-117-76-7-42 in your application.