Data Analytics Backend Engineer

thatgamecompany is best recognized for creating award-winning, enriching, and meaningful game titles such as Journey, Flower, and flOw. Our most recent game, Sky, is our most complex undertaking to date. It is a social network built around the values inherited from a powerful humanistic story. It is a live experience continuously evolving inside a global online theme park. 

We are seeking passionate engineers to join us in building various core backend technologies, including but not limited to:

• Micro services running on container orchestration for rapid iteration of in-game social features

• A real-time, low-latency and multi-regional music jam service

• Infrastructure to enable rich in-game user-generated content

These services and platforms will be the core technology powering our current and future game titles, and eventually made available to external customers. We believe these solutions will fundamentally transform the future of multiplayer social games. We are also live-operating Sky: Children of Light with millions of active users generating terabytes of data per day. 

As a Data Analytics Backend Engineer, you will serve as a crucial nexus between Analytics and Backend Engineering. You will gain deep experience managing our backend stack and microservices, and work closely with Analytics teams to make sure we’re efficiently tracking and storing all of the data we need to understand our millions of players.

On any given day at thatgamecompany, you might:

• Design and implement large-scale, highly available backend systems that serve thousands to millions of concurrent players with a goal of zero downtime.

• Configure new event streams to allow for real-time automated responses to player activity.

• Embrace modern technologies, such as container and cluster management, to ensure a more elastic and robust backend stack.

• Help to foster communication and collaboration between analytics stakeholders and product engineers.

• Improve and maintain an agile and reliable development environment for the backend stack, so that people with varying skill sets in the company can make social experiments easily, and new hires can ramp up quickly.

• Monitor the backend health and respond to any failures or issues in order to deliver a smooth online experience to players all over the world; keep improving DevOps tools to make the job more automatic and less error-prone. 

We expect you to:

• Have deep passion and thoughts for video games; be a gamer and think on behalf of players.

• Be comfortable taking risks and innovating.

• Enjoy working with fast-moving and rapidly-growing small teams.

Must - Haves: 

• Have thorough understanding of scalable and highly available backend systems; be familiar with open-source distributed system tech stacks, including but not limited to scalable databases, caching strategy, distributed transactions and DevOps tools.

• Be able to extract useful information from different sources of logs, find correlations between multiple layers of systems and diagnose failures, suspicious behaviors and performance bottleneck from bottom to top.

• Be comfortable to work with Linux ecosystem; be fluent in Linux or macOS bash CLI tools and Python scripting.

• Have deep knowledge of at least one of Go, Erlang or C++.

• Have deep knowledge of at least one SQL or NoSQL databases. 

• Have deep knowledge of at least one distributed message queue systems.

• Eager to learn any new technology and always open to jump out of your comfort zone. 

Nice to Haves:

Any of the following would be highly preferred, but most of all, we value engineers who are eager to learn new ways to deliver value to players: 

• Managed and maintained production environment on AWS or GCP.

• Deployed services in Kubernetes with Helm and CI/CD tools.

• Experience with Data Engineering or Analytics.

• Experienced in schema design and performance tweaking of MongoDB and Redis.

We look forward to meeting you.