Graduate Game Server Developer
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.
The Graduate Server Developer in the Online Services team will assist with the on-going and ever growing server-side development on game titles such as Elite Dangerous and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar RTS. You will be working in an enthusiastic, agile environment and will be able to develop and expand your skills and abilities by working alongside our skilled and highly experienced developers.
Key Responsibilities:
- Maintaining and adding game features to database-driven web applications in PHP.
- Maintaining and improving the automation of game server infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.
About You:
- Communicate effectively with team members and work collaboratively on game features both within the server team and with other disciplines
- Aware of working with servers and it would be nice to have worked with Linux before
- Curious, have a good aptitude for learning and enjoy variety, with opportunities to work with game data, server-side simulation code, admin tools, server logs & stats, replicating database services and networking.
Qualifications, Skills and Experience:
- Essential
- Degree qualified in a relevant discipline e.g. Computer Science, Maths or Engineering.
- Experience programming in a dynamically typed script-based language, such as Python, PHP, JavaScript or Ruby
- Experience of working with servers
- Desirable
- A-Level Maths
- Experience of using HTML, CSS & JavaScript to build data driven web pages
- An understanding of public cloud systems such as Amazon Web Services.
- Configuring open source server applications, such as docker, apache, nginx, MySQL
- Working with RESTful APIs.
- Working with SQL databases such as MySQL or SQL Server.
- Working with NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB, Redis or MongoDB
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.