Blizzard Entertainment is seeking a talented and passionate lead server engineer to oversee the development of our server infrastructure for an unannounced AAA project. A server engineer at Blizzard embraces and fosters Blizzard’s core value of “Gameplay First” through collaboration with design, engineering, production, and our operations departments to build server technologies and services that realize the vision, requirements, and scalability of their game title.
We are a team of passionate developers that highly value open-minded collaboration, direct feedback, and the eagerness to grab and drive game development to Blizzard quality. As a lead server engineer, you will inspire and align the team around a technical vision for the service architecture that results in best-in-class gameplay and player experiences. By directly managing a team of engineers and collaborating with project leadership, you will help define strategic initiatives and break down clear and achievable goals for the server team. When particularly hard problems arise, you'll draw upon the team's collective creativity to identify solutions that meet the project's needs.
Responsibilities
- Define the project’s technical vision for the server infrastructure, collaborating within the project team and across multiple operations teams within Blizzard to ensure service requirements for the project are clearly defined and met.
- Ensure the efficiency, maintainability, and scalability of the services and technology developed by the server team.
- Act as the primary point of contact for cross-team server development, partnering with a central-service shared game engine team and platform team to define and execute on project requirements.
- Directly manage, evaluate, and mentor the engineering staff of the server team.
- Partner with the production staff and the rest of the leadership team for milestone planning and tracking development progress.
- Evaluate internal/external technologies and tools with the goal of sourcing and integrating technology that meets project requirements and goals.
- Author documentation and communicate best practices and technical constraints of the server stack to team members and external operations departments.
- Champion Blizzard’s core values.
Requirements
- At least 5+ years of relevant experience on a AAA game project; shipped at least one AAA title.
- Must currently hold at least a senior engineering position.
- Previous experience in leading high-performing engineering teams.
- Networking experience in TCP, UDP, and higher-level protocols.
- Prior development experience in distributed systems and client/server architectures.
- Experience with storage technologies (SQL, Cassandra, Redis, etc.).
- Experience with cloud/virtualization/containerization technologies and infrastructure.
- Proven experience shipping games on multiple platforms such as PC, console, and mobile.
- Advanced knowledge of C++, both historical patterns as well as modern language features.
- Proven ability to grow, guide, inspire, and lead growing development/engineering teams.
- Excellent spoken and written communications skills.
- Extraordinary self-motivation and initiative.
- Extensive experience with video games, including action, FPS, and online titles.
Pluses
- B.S. (or higher) degree in Computer Science or equivalent.
- Linux development experience.
- Familiar with security considerations (encryption, denial of service).
- Experience with performance analysis and code optimization.
