Engineering Manager - Tools
About the Shared Technology Group (STG)
Our Shared Technology Group is primarily responsible for developing and maintaining our in-house engine Cobra. They also serve as a group of domain experts to advise game teams on technical problems, best practice and use of Cobra for their games.
STG Tools are responsible for content creation and editing Tools for the Cobra engine. Working closely with programmers and content creators to understand and influence how assets are built, how the runtime game uses them, and what processes are used to create our games.
About the Role
As the STG Tools Engineering Manager you will collaborate with the Head of Tools, Tools Technical Producer, game teams and other Stakeholders to supervise and coordinate the planning and delivery of tools that will be used across a range of projects.
A key part of this role is to balance the needs of projects and work with the team to capture required code features in response to project requests. You and the team will then be tasked with creating technical plans to deliver the requested features and maintain a roadmap for them.
To be successful in this role you will need to be enthusiastic about improvement, efficiency and communication. As projects can be at different development stages you will need to be comfortable supporting work that can be reactive as well as scheduled. You will work with a diverse, talented team of programmers with differing levels of experience and domain knowledge.
Responsibilities:
- Line management:
- Line managing a group of engineers who are working on shared technology used by multiple projects.
- Develop working relationships with the engineers and understand their career goals and aspirations.
- Grow expertise in the team with ongoing coaching, performance reviews & arranging training.
- Process & Communication:
- Liaise with other projects to ensure that their feature requests have clear specifications and desired delivery windows.
- Enhance visibility by sharing upcoming priorities with the engineers and keeping project production teams updated on any changes.
- Regularly track progress and monitor remaining scope in the milestone against available capacity.
- Regularly review product backlogs to ensure balanced future milestones depending on project statuses.
- Supporting department:
- Develop and improve existing practices such as code reviews, knowledge sharing, documentation efforts, and developing career progression frameworks.
- Help identify and resolve skill and resource gaps within the team.
- Promote cross discipline collaboration.
Qualifications, Skills and Experience
- Essential:
- Line management in a software engineering context, preferably using an agile methodology and working with geographically remote team members.
- Experience in motivating an effective team.
- Excellent verbal and written communication.
- Scheduling and coordination experience on a project of any size.
- You do not need to be a programmer but you will need experience of the software development lifecycle.
- Desired:
- Proven people management and leadership skills with a passion for developing individuals and teams.
- Empathy towards the user experience of tools that are undergoing continual development and change.
- Being able to identify and develop compromises when the need arises.