Technical Lead (PCF Online Services)

Company Description

People Can Fly is one of the leading independent AAA games development studios with an international team of hundreds of talented individuals working from offices located in Poland, UK, US, and Canada, and from all over the world thanks to our remote work programs.

Founded in 2002, we made our mark on the shooter genre with titles such as Painkiller, Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment, and Outriders. We are one of the most experienced Unreal Engine studios in the industry and we are expanding it with in-house solutions called PCF Framework.

Our creative teams are currently working on several exciting titles: Gemini is our new project being developed with Square Enix; Maverick is a Triple-A game developed in collaboration with Microsoft Corporation; Bifrost, Victoria and Dagger are projects we're growing in the self-publishing model. We also have one project in the concept phase – Red; as well as two projects in VR technology – Green Hell VR and Bulletstorm VR - an exciting VR version of our cult-classic shooter.

With over 20 years of experience, PCF sets out to explore new horizons. We aim to combine our expertise with creativity of the best and most forward-thinking talents in the industry to work together on the new generation of action games for the global gaming community.

If you decide to accompany us on this journey, you'll have a chance to perfect your craft and expand your knowledge, working alongside leaders in the industry on bringing a brand-new unique experience to the players worldwide.

Job Description

As the Technical Lead, PCF Online Services you will manage a team of backend and frontend engineers creating new custom services and supporting existing online backend services for our games. These would include services such as game server orchestration, user account management, authentication, player inventory, cross-platform squad/lobby, running events, cross-platform friends lists / clans, matchmaking, in-game economy, dynamic game tuning, voice chat and many others.

Your background is in full stack or backend engineering and you have computer science or computer engineering or similar related degrees. You are passionate about designing scalable backend systems, reliable backend APIs, fault- tolerant design and third-party API systems. You are a great owner and have a strong can-do problem solving attitude. You are a critical thinker, and communicate with clarity. You are deeply familiar with software design patterns and able to apply the right one to the right problem.

You have a keen eye for code quality and you can provide effective feedback to other team members on their engineering work. You take pride in the overall outcome and quality of your team's work and are there at every step to make the best outcomes happen. You strive for transparency and clarity with your team and are able to bring the needs of the business together in a strong engineering culture.

Responsibilities:

Develop, maintain, and improve backend services to support our online games across various platforms

Own technical design and manage a team of engineers driving the implementation of robust, highly scalable online solutions

Set up, maintain and optimize best practices, and continuously level up the team and organization

Lead the evaluation and selection of the appropriate technology platforms, frameworks and deployment architectures for each given problem to solve

Evaluate and recommend tools and processes to ensure the highest quality product platform

Collaborate with game development teams, quality assurance and end users to architect and build cutting-edge server-side software solutions as well as ensuring quality integrations of our backend services into those titles

Collaborate with the product and project managers to map out and deliver team objectives and priorities for the year based on company goals and product roadmap

You will spend less time writing code. Drawing from your ample experience building highly scalable backend systems you will drive the technical direction of our shared backend services, and be a technical leader and a sounding board to members of your technical team

Identify and solve cross cutting technical issues and team issues to achieve business goals

Identify and proactively tackle technical debt through cost/benefit analytics for eliminating debt and suggested timelines for how to prioritize it

Responsible for your team's productivity and impact

Scale testing and performance tuning of the entire stack

Ensuring quality, predictability and reliability by setting up, maintaining and optimizing best practices, and continuously leveling up the team and organization

Qualifications

Minimum 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, working on cross-functional teams

5+ years of experience managing high performing backend teams.

5+ years of experience designing and analyzing the performance of backend applications.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

Experience with developing back-end services and related concepts such as Service SLAs, up-time, scalability, etc.

A thorough understanding of cloud-native architectures, microservice development and operational best practices in the cloud

Hands on expertise with Kubernetes container platforms in cloud-native environments

Knowledge of Terraform or similar architecture as code solutions

Strong communication skills across a variety of disciplines including with product, engineering, stakeholders, and QA

Experience in working with cloud-based architectures and AWS specifically;

Experience with SQL and NoSQL stores (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc)

Additional Information

What we offer

A competitive salary and performance-based annual bonuses.

Private medical healthcare (Vitality) and BUPA dental insurance for PCF's employees and their families.

Access to wellbeing platform - Gympass for employees and family members.

Access to Worksmile - cafeteria program.

Online Polish and English language classes.

Access to the pension scheme.

Flexible working hours.

Free virtual health and mental wellbeing sessions included in the plan for members and their dependents.

Personal development opportunities and ability to work in a global environment.

Work in a creative team with people full of passion for what they do.