Staff Systems Software Engineer

Staff Systems Software Engineer

As a Staff Systems Software Engineer at Thatgamecompany, you will play a crucial role in ensuring the quality and velocity of our game development process. You will focus on building systems that prove the correctness, speed, and readiness of our gameplay features, as well as the infrastructure that enables our engineers to work efficiently.

Key Responsibilities:

• Prove Correctness and Quality: Build and own the studio's functional test automation framework, including runner, fixtures, game-state harness, and reporting. Develop regression analysis tooling that separates real regressions from noise and attributes them to a commit automatically.
• Find the Breaking Point: Design load/stress testing systems that model realistic player behavior and drive launch-scale synthetic traffic against pre-production. Build chaos testing capability, including fault injection, latency/partition simulation, and dependency failure.
• Prove Quality on Real Devices: Build app quality testing automation, including frame time, memory, thermal, battery, and cold-start capture. Own the device compatibility lab, orchestration, and certification matrix.
• Own the Infrastructure: Build/operate on-prem build clusters and GPU clusters, backing buy-vs-build decisions with real data. Design cross-platform developer tools, including AI-assisted tooling.
• Make it Land: Define, instrument, and publish developer velocity/quality metrics. Drive adoption across teams and mentor engineers in testing strategy and performance analysis.

Requirements:

• Languages: Python, Golang, C/C++, Jenkins Groovy, Linux shell scripting, and fluent English.
• Testing & Quality Systems: Test framework design, load/stress tooling, fault injection/chaos engineering, coverage instrumentation, and flake detection.
• Performance & Analysis: CPU/GPU/memory/I/O profiling, statistical analysis, regression detection, and observability.
• Build & CI at Scale: Jenkins/GitLab CI/CD, Make/CMake, GCC/Clang, distributed build systems/caching, and Git/GitLab.
• Infrastructure: Linux/macOS administration, bare-metal/on-prem cluster ops, Docker/Podman, Kubernetes, Terraform/OpenTofu, and hardware capacity planning.
• Systems Fundamentals: Distributed systems failure modes, TCP/IP and UDP, resilience patterns, and disaster recovery planning.

Preferred Skills:

• Mobile device farm operation, Android/iOS build and profiling toolchains, GPU cluster scheduling, game engine internals/engine-level test automation, deterministic simulation/replay testing, live service game experience, Windows administration, Ansible, TypeScript/Java/Kotlin/Swift, and hybrid/multi-cloud management.

Benefits:

• Paid Time Off, Holidays, and Two Weeks Winter Break
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents
• Pet Insurance
• Compassionate leave
• Pre-tax wellness stipend
• Pre-tax work from home stipend
• Access to savings plan (401K program) with company match
• Mental health resources, including Headspace membership and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Discount portal for everyday goods and services
• Employee inclusive and diversity initiatives
• Support for personal professional development