This job listing expired on Feb 12, 2021
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WHAT IS A THINKING APE?
A Thinking Ape builds communities through mobile games with emergent social play and original IP. We released our first game in 2009 and have been profitable and growing every year since. We're a bottom-up driven company with small teams that have a big focus on ownership and data-driven decision making. Our portfolio of games are growing. We're scaling our infrastructure and entering new markets to capitalize on this growth and bring our games to more players.

WHAT IS THE ROLE?
As a software engineer with a specialization in distributed systems, you'll design, build, monitor and scale the services that power our most popular live mobile games, including Kingdoms of Heckfire, Party in my Dorm, and Kingdoms at War. These games handle hundreds of thousands of active users competing, communicating, and cooperating in real-time. This role has a major impact on the types of experiences that ATA can provide to our continuously growing player communities, as well as how resilient our systems are to disruptions and failures. As such, you'll be involved in every aspect of product development. Millions of people will use what you create.

WHAT WILL YOU DO?
You'll be responsible for evolving the architecture of our services and contributing new capabilities, tools, and efficiencies for our games in live operation. Our game backends are primarily written in Python, built with a microservice architecture, and with heavy use of Kafka, Redis, MySQL, Memcached, Grafana/Graphite, Kibana, and other technologies. You'll also:

  • Build scalable systems for massively multiplayer mobile games that will support thousands of concurrent users.
  • Create tools to automate and optimize processes across disciplines. These might be adding additional player management tools for our community team, data pipeline optimizations for our game designers, or even content pipelines for our art team.
  • Become involved in every aspect of product development, from design to implementation to playtests to metrics analysis.
  • Lead the technical investigation, implementation, release, and iteration of solutions to large scale product and infrastructure problems.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

The primary qualifications we're looking for are:

  • You are a tech generalist with the ability to pick up new technologies quickly.
  • Extensive track record architecting and implementing scalable backend services and systems.
  • You communicate your thoughts and ideas clearly in code and in writing.
  • You have an interest in and play mobile games.

Other qualifications that help are:

  • You have experience working on a live mobile product and a strong understanding of mobile application architecture and content pipelines.
  • You are familiar with relational database design and structure.
  • You have a domain-driven approach to software design and development.
  • You are familiar working with load balancers, data replication, distributed message queues, and distributed data stores.
  • You have experience with data analysis, KPI impact analysis and metrics based decision making.
  • You have project management experience with the ability to prioritize product needs against timelines for implementation and current product KPIs.

WHILE EVERYONE ON OUR TEAM IS DIFFERENT, TO THRIVE HERE YOU SHOULD...

  • Be self motivated, take pride in your work and enjoy huge amounts of ownership
  • Set aside your ego and have wonderful arguments with your coworkers in order to create something better than any one person could individually
  • Challenge your own assumptions and use data to make decisions whenever possible
  • Be passionate about teaching others what you know and continuing your own growth every day
  • Not be afraid to fail–you experiment and learn from your mistakes

What's In It For You

At ATA you're offered a flexible, safe, inclusive environment in which you have the autonomy to do your best work, surrounded by a strong team and with the encouragement of supportive leadership that doesn't just care what you're doing, but how you're doing. You're trusted, respected, listened to, cared for and valued. You take on thought-provoking projects and tackle fun problems alongside people who are equally invested in making meaningful contributions and seeing new ideas come to life. You know how your work aligns with the company's goals. Your career is given the space and resources to progress. You accomplish things that make you proud. You are compensated competitively, your health and wellbeing are top priorities and you enjoy plenty of perks. You build communities, take ownership, have wonderful arguments, let the best ideas win and keep growing. You don't just work for ATA, you are an integral part of ATA.

OUR COMMITMENT TO INCLUSION

At ATA we build communities. But community extends beyond our players: it also encompasses our employees and candidates. We support diversity in the workplace and always strive for inclusion. Part of this is selfish; we believe we'll make better decisions if we're able to tap into a variety of different perspectives. But we also care that our employees and candidates feel valued and comfortable being themselves. Please consider applying even if you don't meet

every

qualification. Experience comes in many forms and we value adding diverse perspectives to our teams.

DISCOVER EVEN MORE

Check out our story to find out how we got to where we are today, and learn about our culture by following @athinkingape on social. You can also listen to Kenshi Arasaki, ATA CEO & Co-Founder, talk about what it's like to work here.