Lead Backend Programmer – Live Services

About Creative Assembly

Creative Assembly is one of Europe's leading games development studios, founded in 1987 and located in West Sussex, UK and in Sofia, Bulgaria. With a heritage of award-winning AAA titles, including the multi-million selling Total War™ series, Creative Assembly continues to build an impressive portfolio of games with an as-yet unannounced FPS-IP and world-renowned partnerships; with Games Workshop on Total War™: WARHAMMER®, Twentieth Century Fox on Alien: Isolation, plus 343 Industries and Microsoft on Halo Wars 2. Creative Assembly has, with their exceptionally talented team of over 700, amassed a wealth of awards including multiple Best Place to Work awards and accolades from BAFTA, Music+Sound and Develop’s Industry Excellence awards.

Position

In this role, you will work with game teams to ensure they have the backend services they need to support their games and workflows. You will be involved in centralised technical infrastructure for automated deployments, CI/CD processes.

In this role, you will engage your technical experience and use your excellent communication skills and clearly define and share complex design systems to non-technical teams and business leaders. You will spend time speaking with our developers and be an astute listener, extracting technical requirements from game teams and feature designs. You will also be expected to regularly take part in architectural discussions with the wider team. You will take responsibility for mentoring and developing programmers at all levels.

You will be responsible for feature implementation and integration, remaining hands on and practical with the work on the team and share your experience of working with high-volume systems, to help provide a resilient and responsive online service for our significant playerbase.

Your qualification

• Proven implementation skills dependent on the problem being solved; we are running Erlang, Python, C++ and some NodeJS in production
• Understanding of whole tech stack, from design to implementation to LiveOps, plus an appreciation of how tech decisions can impact and affect other areas of the business
• Experience working with cloud/virtualised environments, and/or containerisation of services
• Desire to always improve and keep up to date with current technologies
• Strong communication skills
• Communicate complex system designs to non-technical game teams and business leaders, extracting technical requirements from game teams and feature designs
• Regular architectural discussions with colleagues
• Be able to report clearly on progress and remaining tasks
• Proven leadership ability
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Will be a plus

• Awareness of CA games
• A desire to remain hands-on, driving implementation

What we offer

• Bespoke and funded relocation package for you and your dependents, with support throughout the process from our dedicated Relocation Specialist
• Enhanced maternity and paternity, private medical and dental insurance, life insurance, permanent health insurance, critical illness cover and free health care screening
• Generous holiday allowance plus full studio closure over the Christmas and New Year period, as all UK Bank holidays
• Annual discretionary studio bonus
• Join our award-winning education and social responsibility programme; the Legacy Project, as an industry ambassador to mentor and educate others
• Defined career development pathways and personalised training support including; SEGA Dev Day, internal masterclasses, prestigious creative workshops, on-site training with renowned specialists and global conference attendance
• Season ticket travel loans and cycle to work scheme with free bike servicing and discounted car valet service on site
• Free games and merchandise plus access to our extensive games library
• Free breakfast every day - toast, bagels, pancakes, cereals, yoghurts, fresh fruit, smoothies, juices, milkshakes and more in our fully stocked kitchen*
• Wellbeing support with an employee assistance programme and onsite confidential sessions
• In-studio heavily subsidised massage therapy*
• Discounts for home technology, travel insurance, corporate gym membership, cinema tickets, holidays, trips out and Ikea vouchers, and many local businesses including estate agents
• Studio parties for you and your family; such as our Summer Festival, Christmas Party plus a separate Children’s Christmas Party. We also have Cinema days and wrap parties for game releases*
• Studio community activities such as free Japanese lessons, life drawing, creative writing, Pilates, Walking Challenges, Couch to 5k, basketball, game and movie evenings, board game club, 5-a-side football, CA Choir, Sword fighting (yes, sword fighting) and loads more*

*some of the above in-studio benefits are on hold while we work remotely during COVID-19