Backend Software Engineer

Job Summary

Welcome to Maxis, home to tinkerers, craftspeople, & storytellers. We aim to inspire everyone to make a better world through creative play. As the developer of The Sims , we create games and experiences for millions of people around the world and are always looking for new ways to inspire our players. Maxis is a place where you can do what you love and help others grow while doing it, a place where your unique voice can be heard and seen. We put creativity and inclusivity at the core of our work and don't settle for seeing the world only as it is but strive to build a world as it could be.

We're looking for a software engineer to work on cloud web services to help us bring exciting new features to life. In this role, you will be part of a small team responsible for supporting legacy Maxis titles. You will work with an experienced team that has collectively built Maxis games for more than two decades.

You will report to a Development Director for the backend services team and your work will be in Java, Spring, Linux/Bash, and deployed to cloud platforms.

As a Backend Software Engineer at Maxis, you will

• Develop responsive, resilient, massively scalable, and globally available web services that support millions of players
• Creatively blend security best practices and original techniques to keep user data secure and prevent cheating
• Apply and improve service deployment and troubleshooting strategies that maximize uptime
• Drive design and implementation of APIs and protocols that are consistent, formalized, and testable
• Demonstrate excellent technical problem-solving skills under iteratively changing requirements during game development
• Author and review technical design documents and API specifications detailing software requirements
• Maintain a suite of automated tests that validate the correctness of backend services

Qualifications

Please note that you do not need to qualify for all requirements to be considered. We encourage you to apply if you can meet most of the requirements and are comfortable opening a dialog to be considered

• Bachelor/Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field.
• 5+ years of job experience in a hands on coding role
• You've shipped and supported scalable web services hosted in the cloud
• You own large systems and features from design to deployment, including live service support
• You develop high-quality, testable software
• You have a desire to work with client engineers and designers to iteratively add features and improve APIs
• You develop APIs for products that release new updates with zero downtime strategies and tools
• You have experience with load testing, troubleshooting, and optimizing the performance of web services
• You work on software that requires developing and optimizing queries and database access patterns
• You're willing to iterate quickly and develop multiple short-lived prototypes

Pluses

• You have experience developing services that support mobile applications
• You've worked in the games industry before
• You've built software with Java or Kotlin
• You've shipped services using the Spring Framework
• You've worked on large teams using version control
• You have experience with Linux system administration, DevOps and/or CI/CD pipelines
• You have experience with AWS services like EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, Route53
• You have experience working in large data-driven services