Electronic Arts

Role: Technical Director, Maxis

Location: Melbourne, Australia, can relocate from Japan or elsewhere

Role Expectations

• Guide & review technology development on a Sims game, working with the lead architect and engineers internally and with our external development partner.
• Partner with the game’s leadership to prioritize and execute on tech goals and milestones, establish best practices, and promote the core development values.
• Work with Production, Development Directors, external partners, and other disciplines leads to scope tasks and input requirements.
• Create and adjust technical decisions and roadmap priorities for the game including networking and online infrastructure, using your technical expertise to draw out not only the WHAT & WHEN, but the WHY for the roadmap.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to internal and external engineers.
• Be a hands-on participant in architecture/design for our hardest technical challenges.
• Review completed engineering deliverables before release.
• Collaborate with broader team partners (quality assurance, certification, production, design, art, analytics, and so on) to ensure that engineering interests and values are represented and maintained through the course of development, and that features are being developed with Tech capabilities and performance limitations in mind.
• Identify, manage, and drive to completion, risks and mitigations for the project
• Perform research to acquire new knowledge necessary to perform assigned tasks and maintain the technological evolution of the project.
• Gain a depth of knowledge of The Sims and EA's current game technology.
• Must be willing and able to travel within Asia regularly (approximately once every other month)
• Hybrid or on-site work model based out of Melbourne

You have

• 8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer or lead engineer shipping games on console/PC/mobile. 
• 3+ years of experience leading a team of software engineers to architect, develop, ship & live service a mobile/PC/console game.
• Shipped at least 1 AAA console (Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft) or cross-platform (mobile/console/PC) game.
• Experience working with internal and external development teams.
• Experience shipping games with the Unity game engine.
• Experience with architecture of game systems spanning tools, client & server technologies.
• Expert in at least one of the following domains, and some experience with the other two:
  • Online networking and networking optimizations: connectivity, minimize bandwidth usage, decrease latency, etc.
  • Game simulation systems
  • Console game development
  • Resource management, memory management & graphics performance optimization

Bonus:

• Experience shipping RPG or simulation games.
• Experience shipping games on Nintendo consoles. 
• Experience working with outsourcing and external partners.
• Interested in and/or experienced with applications of Machine Learning in game development.
• Fluency or partial fluency in Japanese