Are you looking for an opportunity that thrives on your enthusiasm for gaming? Have you always dreamed about joining a world-class gaming studio since you were a kid? Do you have an interest in engineering systems that lead to better efficiency?

The Initiative is a Santa Monica-based game development studio creating Perfect Dark. We are in a unique position to operate as an independent studio under the banner and backing of Xbox Game Studios and Microsoft. Our ambition is to build groundbreaking, high-quality games that leave an impact.

At The Initiative, we are looking for an enthusiastic, customer focused engineer to support and improve scalability and efficiency across our build, content pipeline, and engineering systems (DevOps). You will have the chance to apply your technical prowess and understanding of gaming production systems to build processes and tools to evolve our game into Games as a Service. You will be given opportunities to work alongside feature developers, technical artists and content creators, learn about their production processes and use that knowledge to improve their workflows.

As The Initiative grows, your work here will help the studio expand into new territory, reaching more customers, and reaching them in ways not yet previously explored. We will highlight your unique strengths and will provide you with the right opportunities that best leverage your areas of passion. We value the perspective and experience you bring and balance both a collaborative working environment with an acceptance of an autonomous working style. The Initiative, we’re offering a once-in-a-career opportunity to be a part of defining a studio from the ground up, and are committed to building and delivering the next great AAA gaming experience.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities​:

• Participate in support rotation with other members of the Infrastructure team
• Handle day to day support operations on gaming infrastructure
• Partner with engineering team to improve stability, performance, and maintainability
• Plan, migrate and support gaming infrastructure in Microsoft Azure or on-prem where applicable
• Support Infrastructure and partner teams on development initiatives
• Investigate, report, and resolve infrastructure team issues
• Create, adjust and monitor Infrastructure team SLAs, SLIs and SLOs and work toward resolving any failing indicators
• Create telemetry and dashboards to visualize infrastructure health

Qualifications

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor of Math/Computer Science and 2 years of professional software development experience, or 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Programming background in C#, scripting languages
• Exemplary Kubernetes and Terraform experience
• Professional PowerShell experience
• General, low level networking skills
• Heavy cloud services experience with Azure (hybrid - on prem/cloud)
• Experience with build technologies (TeamCity, IncrediBuild, MSBuild, NAnt, BuildTracker, etc.)
• Experience with source control system (Perforce, Git)
• Strong communication and cross-team development skills
• Passion for games and a drive to create amazing AAA game experiences

Preferred Experience:

• Professional C++ experience
• Experince with Grafana
• Professional experience developing Services (XaaS)
• Experience building complex frameworks and infrastructure
• Previous AAA gaming experience

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.