Engineering Manager - Game Server
As our Server Engineering Manager across our range of game server development teams, currently focusing on Warhammer: Age of Sigmar RTS (AoS) and Elite Dangerous (ED), you will collaborate with the Lead Server Developers, Production and Head of Online to supervise and coordinate the planning and delivery of work from the AoS and ED Server teams.
To be successful in this role you'll need to be enthusiastic about improvement, efficiency and communication, ensuring your team members are well supported and enabling the Leads to focus more on the technical aspects of delivering the creative visions to the required quality standard. These projects are at different development stages, you will need to be comfortable supporting work that is reactive to the needs of live game services as well as scheduled feature and content development. You'll work with a diverse, talented team of programmers with differing levels of experience and domain knowledge and will make valuable contributions to the management of the Online Services department.
Responsibilities:
- Process & Communication:
- Create visibility by sharing upcoming priorities with the engineers and keeping the project production teams updated
- Drive milestone requirements and help keep the backlogs reviewed
- Regularly track progress and monitor remaining scope in the milestone against available capacity
- Liaise with other Frontier teams and projects to ensure feature requests from the game server developers are provided with clear specifications and delivery windows.
- Line management:
- Develop working relationships with the teams and understand their career goals and aspirations
- Line management of 6-8 server engineers who're working across large game projects
- Grow the expertise in the team with ongoing coaching, performance reviews & arranging training
- Supporting department:
- Participate in Online's leadership group to inform and affect decision making, balancing between business-oriented goals and technical goals
- Work with the recruitment/HR team to attract, onboard, and retain diverse top talent
- Develop and improve practices like code reviews, knowledge sharing & coding standards
- Supporting the head of department with activities such as arranging training, facilitating internal knowledge sharing, working with outsource vendors, driving documentation efforts and further developing Online's career progression framework
- Help identify and resolve skill and resource gaps within the teams
Qualifications, skills and experience:
- Essential:
- Line management in a software engineering context, preferably using an agile methodology and working with geographically remote team members
- Excellent verbal and written communication, including strong presentation skills
- You do not need to be a programmer or systems administrator, but you will need experience of the software development lifecycle
- Experience recruiting, building and motivating an effective team
- Scheduling and coordination experience on a project of any size
- Desired:
- Evaluated employee performance and experience in managing performance and helping to improve performance
- Confident to have difficult conversations when required
- Positive and productive tones of communication when bring issues to other's attention
- Highlights opportunities and shares successes
- Prior games industry experience is not required, but insights into game services are a plus, as is an empathy for the player experience