Technical Director owning architecture, modernization, and AI-enabled engineering for Big Viking Games’ live-service games. Leading hands-on development across real-time systems and shared platform services.
Responsibilities
Own the technical direction across live games and shared platform services.
Plan, evaluate, and execute architectural changes with technical leads and senior engineers.
Drive alignment on technical decisions that are expensive to reverse.
Lead migrations, protocol changes, schema changes, staged rollouts, and live production improvements.
Balance modernization against stability in mature, revenue-generating systems.
Maintain technical quality and consistency across concurrent projects and shared services.
Document architectural decisions and ensure they are understood and executable.
Ship code across TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML5, Java, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS.
Work on browser clients, custom rendering technology, asset loading, performance, backend services, real-time game systems, and platform integrations.
Refactor and extend legacy systems while managing production risk.
Improve build, test, deployment, local development, tooling, automation, and developer experience.
Improve maintainability, observability, testability, and usability of the codebase for humans and agents.
Identify technical improvements that reduce risk, increase velocity, and improve long-term system health.
Push agentic tooling into software building, testing, reviewing, and maintenance.
Build or guide AI-enabled workflows that take action in engineering systems.
Establish guardrails, review standards, and escalation paths for agent-generated output.
Review agent-produced code and recommendations rigorously.
Decide when agentic tooling should and should not be used.
Help the team move from individual AI usage to repeatable engineering leverage.
Align company goals with technical strategy, roadmap requirements, and engineering priorities with the Head of Engineering.
Align engineers on technical direction through disagreement.
Raise the technical bar through code review, architecture review, design standards, documentation, and disciplined decision-making.
Provide process feedback that improves how the team works.
Support engineers’ growth and career development with the Engineering Manager.
Help engineers improve judgment around production risk, system design, quality, maintainability, and tradeoffs.
Bring calm, clarity, and technical credibility to difficult engineering decisions.
Requirements
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with recent years spent hands-on.
Significant experience owning architecture or technical direction in production systems.
Experience working on live-service games, high-availability consumer products, real-time systems, or other software that must keep running while it evolves.
1+ year building with agentic coding tools or tool-calling systems that automate real engineering work.
Experience with systems that take action, such as agents wired into code pipelines, tool integrations, automated diagnosis, automated remediation, production workflows, or AI-assisted engineering systems beyond simple code completion.
Experience working across multiple concurrent projects or product areas while maintaining technical quality and consistency.
Strong TypeScript and JavaScript experience.
Strong HTML5 and web client engineering experience, including browser rendering, asset loading, performance, and real-world network conditions.
Java experience sufficient to work in and make architectural decisions about a real-time game server.
PHP experience, or clear evidence of ability to pick it up quickly and own architecture in a PHP backend.
Strong understanding of relational databases, especially MySQL or similar systems, including schema changes in systems that stay online.
Experience with Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, queues, caching, or event-driven systems.
AWS experience and comfort understanding the infrastructure code runs on.
Experience with Docker, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or similar build and deployment tooling.
Strong debugging, refactoring, performance, and production troubleshooting skills.
Strong understanding of system design, integration points, deployment risk, and long-term maintainability.
Evidence of aligning engineers on technical direction, including through disagreement.
Evidence of improving how a team works.
Evidence of coaching, mentoring, or developing engineers.
Comfort setting standards and holding the architectural conversation with people who disagree.
Strong technical communication with engineers, product, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to make tradeoffs between speed, quality, player risk, revenue impact, and long-term system health.
High ownership, low ego, and a strong bias toward practical execution.
Nice to have: experience with 2D rendering engines, WebGL 2D pipelines, display-list architectures, sprite graphs, or custom renderers.
Nice to have: Flash, Flex, or ActionScript heritage.
Nice to have: experience migrating large Flash-era products to HTML5.
Nice to have: real-time multiplayer systems.
Nice to have: SmartFoxServer or comparable real-time game server platforms.
Nice to have: experience with game economies, virtual goods, player-driven markets, or social game systems.
Nice to have: experience with live operations, event systems, content pipelines, and production tools.
Nice to have: experience in small, high-leverage teams.
Nice to have: experience using AI coding agents, tool-calling workflows, or agentic systems in production engineering.
Benefits
Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation.
Comprehensive benefits package, including health, dental, and vision coverage.
Health and Wellness spending account.
Generous time off policies.
Ownership of the architecture behind long-running live-service games with established player communities.
A senior technical seat with a real mandate, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering.
Exposure to modernization, agentic engineering workflows, real-time systems, shared platform services, and live-game technology.
AI-assisted recruiting process disclosure and candidate status notification within 45 days of the final interview.
Accessibility accommodations throughout the hiring process as needed.
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