Job Description

thatgamecompany designs and develops artistically crafted, broadly accessible video games that push the boundaries of interactive entertainment. We respect our players and want to contribute meaningful, enriching experiences that touch and inspire them.

We seek talent that values integrity and personal growth within an environment of intense collaboration and experimentation.

Our mission - create timeless entertainment that makes a positive change to the human psyche worldwide. If you’ve been wanting to have a positive impact on people's lives and the creative challenges associated with doing something different and unique, then come help us shine brighter together.

thatgamecompany is building an R&D team in China. The new team will help the company with a long-term tech stack, including backend infrastructure, multi-tenant platforms and microservices, data warehouse, and data pipeline.

Location: Shanghai

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 and aim for zero downtime. 

• Embrace modern container and cluster management technology to make our backend stack more elastic and robust.

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

• Monitor the backend health and respond to any failures or glitches to deliver a smooth online experience to players worldwide; keep improving dev-ops tools to make the job more automatic and error-proof. 

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 accomplish engineering achievements that no one else has done.

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

Required Skills

• 1 year or more experience in backend development and deployment in a production environment.

• Have a 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 dev-ops 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 bottlenecks from bottom to top.

• Be comfortable working with the 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 database. 

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

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

• Capable to understand English documentation. Fluent in written English for technical communications in chat tools. Be able to speak English for daily life.

Preferred Skills

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: 

• Deep understanding of Go or Erlang. 

• Managed and maintained production environment on AWS or GCP.

• Deployed services in Kubernetes with CI/CD tools.

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

• Experienced in building systems that involve eventually or strongly consistent distributed transactions.

• Fluent in spoken English for professional communications.