The Initiative is a new first-party game studio located in Santa Monica backed by Microsoft. Our studio is about craft, creating story, innovating, and looking ahead to the next big thing.
At the Initiative, we are looking for collaborative problem solvers who want to dive into something new and create groundbreaking experiences for our players. Join us for this once in a career opportunity to help build the studio, define our culture, and create an environment to attract world-class talent.
We’re looking for a Lead Online Services Engineer - someone who is excited to push the state of the art in connected experiences. You’re going to be a person with excellent distributed systems skills, operating services at scale and an understanding of what modern gaming connected experiences require.
As you work with designers, engineers and data analysts - you will shape the toolbox and team knowledge needed to compete at the sharp end of AAA game development. You are versatile, have strong development and production-sense, and the expertise to inspire and mentor others to do their best work.
Responsibilities
As the Lead Online Services Engineer, you will work directly with the engineering team and other key stakeholders across disciplines to deliver the following:
- Define and build an online services strategy for a new studio.
- Take on complex online services and own their technical delivery.
- Drive full stack development for back-end services through to client-side integration.
- Develop a continuous integration and deployment pipeline for online services.
- Develop, teach and implement best practices for service development.
- Maintain strong relationships between the different disciplines.
- Actively contribute to growth of new start up studio: lead by example, including demonstrating a willingness to give and receive feedback, collaborate with others to share techniques, ideas, and contribute to a positive working environment.
Qualifications
- BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- 6+ years of C#/Java/Go/C++ software engineering experience.
- 5+ years of experience in designing, developing, and shipping online services at scale.
- Experience in core areas of online services development including distributed systems, containerization and high availability.
- Experience leading, building and developing high functioning teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with RESTful services.
- Expertise in relational database design and experience developing systems with NoSQL/MongoDB/Couchbase.
- Experience working on cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure.
- Ability to quickly prototype and iterate in collaboration with others.
- Self-directed and takes the initiative to drive progress.
- Self-motivated and directed; able to act with a sense of agency and accountability.
- Strong communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.
Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.
