Jobs: Lead Cloud Engineer

Following on from the success of ‘Kinect Sports’ and its recent sequel ‘Kinect Sports: Season Two’, Rare is continuing to push the boundaries of the Kinect hardware with our exciting new project. We’re looking for an experienced and passionate server engineer to join us on this journey.

Based at our custom built Twycross site, this role will involve you working within the Cloud engineering team to produce a cutting edge extensible solution to drive in-game updates, analytics, telemetry and back-end analytics and reporting  which expands the boundaries of knowledge about how our games are bought and used. As part of your role, you will also be required to work closely with Artists, Designers and Program Managers to ensure the game provides relevant, consumable data.

Team/Department Mission

·         Affect gameplay engineers to ensure game supports synchronous, remote multiplayer modes.

·         Implement game state synchronization.

·         Understand and refine game and customer behaviour requirements by working with non-engineering disciplines.

·         Implement in-game telemetry and reporting mechanism.

·         Understand and create data storage and reporting system to deliver relevant game and customer behaviour reports to non-engineering disciplines.

·         Affect IT infrastructure decisions to support the above.

Key Accountabilities

·         Own cross-product, technical cloud compute strategy to support asset generation, asset conversation, runtime computational or runtime storage requirements.

·         Own Live partnership discussion and development with Xbox platform team.

·         With Gameplay and Runtime Lead Engineers, ensure product architecture supports synchronous, remote multiplayer modes.

·         With senior synchronization engineers, define cross-product, game state synchronization architecture.

·         Understand and refine game & customer behavioural analysis requirements by working with non-engineering disciplines.

·         Work with product analysis team to define in-game telemetry and reporting mechanism.

·         Understand and define data storage and reporting system to deliver relevant game and customer behaviour reports to non-engineering disciplines.

·         Work with Microsoft IT and external platform partners to affect IT infrastructure decisions.

·         Own planning for software services to support gameplay, data sharing, and title instrumentation.

·         Own client (game) side libraries to interface with server/cloud hosted services.

·         Work with IT infrastructure engineers to onboard and maintain services.

·         Mentor and manage engineers in cloud group.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Essential Experience

·         Previous server experience on at least one released AAA title.

·         Previous network synchronization experience on at least one released AAA title.

·         Previous management/mentoring experience.

Technical/Functional Skills

·         Excellent C++ architecture, programming and debugging skills using modern C++.

·         Strong C# and SQL Server architecture, programming and debugging skills.

·         Ability to lead, inspire and manage a small team of server/synchronization engineers.

·         Ability to establish win-win solutions with other game disciplines.

·         Solid understanding of:

o        Design and development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and/or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

o        WCF, web services and IIS.

o        Windows service applications.

o        Database design

o        Cloud development (Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine or equivalent.

o        Familiarity with

o        Windows server platforms.

o        XML and JSON data formats, as well as SOAP and REST protocols.

o        Game server code

o        SQL performance tuning and optimization

Personal Attributes/Interpersonal Skills

·         Excellent oral and written communication skills.

·         Outgoing and pro-active personality who thrives on working within a team.

·         Self-motivated with a drive for excellence.

Qualifications

BSc, BEng, or MS in Computer Science or equivalent.

Closing date: 3rd January 2012.

To find out more and apply, visit

  http://bit.ly/srczbI

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