Engineering Manager - Game Server
Frontier is an established, market leading independent developer and publisher of videogames for PC and consoles. Founded in 1994, we are based in the world-leading technology cluster and historic city of Cambridge, England. With a growing team of over 750 talented people, we are passionate about creating innovative genre-leading games and authentic worlds for our communities of players.
We have achieved serial successes across a wide variety of titles including Elite Dangerous, Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Zoo. We are continuing to grow our team to support our existing portfolio and an exciting and ambitious future roadmap, which includes the development of both own-IP titles and licensed-IP titles. Our IP-license partners include Universal (Jurassic World), Formula 1 and Games Workshop (Warhammer).We are also growing our team to continue the expansion of Frontier Foundry, our publishing label for games developed by carefully selected partner studios.
We have a modern spacious studio located on the Cambridge Science Park in the heart of the Cambridge tech hub. For those who wish to relocate to the Cambridge area and work either entirely in the studio or flexibly between the studio and home, we can provide generous financial and practical support to facilitate your move. We are also able to offer remote working for those who would prefer to work almost exclusively from home or who are unable to relocate. We can discuss your preferences with you during the recruitment process.
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
What we can offer you
We offer the chance to work with talented and passionate people, developing and publishing sophisticated and enduring games in a creative and collaborative environment. We love what we do, and we work hard to provide outstanding experiences for our player communities. Frontier rewards this passion and determination by sharing in the company’s success and by supporting our teams to keep doing what they love.
Well-being is a big focus at Frontier and we are continually evolving how we can support our staff. We encourage a healthy work/life balance and host a range of well-being activities, initiatives and sessions to support both mental and physical health.
We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, which includes a success-based annual bonus, share option schemes, pension, life assurance, private family healthcare, flexitime working hours, enhanced maternity/paternity package, in-house subsidised catering, support with relocation, a Cycle to Work scheme and free bike servicing, and social events.
We welcome and encourage applications from qualified candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, religion or belief.
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Meet the team
Katherine
Principal Programmer
Hi! I'm Katherine and I'm a Principal Programmer on Frontier's in-house engine. I work on various aspects of engine coding, focussing on supporting new console platforms, and on feature requests from our game teams. I also help mentor new programmers who are starting at Frontier.
I joined Frontier as a Graduate Programmer in 2009, and Kinectimals for Xbox 360 was the first shipped title I worked on. I have been involved in developing many titles including Zoo Tycoon, Tales From Deep Space, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution, and have enjoyed working with the teams on those projects. Since moving to the engine, I have been involved in porting the engine to the next generation consoles and supporting game teams with recent console releases.
James
Senior Gameplay Programmer
Hey, I’m James. I’m a Senior Gameplay Programmer and currently Lead on Planet Zoo. My day-to-day role involves managing and supporting all the game features on a project, and collaborating with every other department to make sure things work as expected! I help the Programming Team to implement and maintain features on games, I also interview and train new programmers on the project.
I started in 2012, and have worked on a bunch of great games, such as Kinect Sports: Rivals, Screamride, Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo. It’s always been great to work with such a talented team of creatives. It’s also been lovely to see our work generate such a huge amount of love and creativity from the community of players that we keep working with. The company has grown a lot in the time I've been here and myself along with it.