Senior Server Engineer: Storage - Microsoft Studios - Lift London Job

Job Title Senior Server Engineer: Storage - Microsoft Studios - Lift London Job
Job Category Programming
Skills Required Programming
Location London
Job Description Job Category: Software Engineering: Development
Location: London, GB
Job ID: 830568-106799
Division: Interactive Entertainment Business

Senior Server Engineer - Storage
Lift London
Interactive Entertainment Business: Europe, Middle East, Asia
Location: Soho, London
Package: Competitive Salary + Bonuses + Benefits

Role Purpose
We are opening a new studio in the heart of London that will be creating new and exciting entertainment products aimed at a diverse audience on multiple platforms. We are looking for an experienced, passionate technical server engineer to join us on this journey. This role will involve you defining requirements, architecting solutions and driving implementation of our server side networking solutions.
A key part of this role will be networking with other Microsoft teams in order to achieve the studio's and product's goals.

Team/Department Mission
This role is part of a Microsoft Studios team creating games and entertainment services influenced by changing consumer consumption and emerging business models. Part of its purpose will be to showcase functionality of Microsoft platforms but the primary goal is to establish new entertainment franchises. The ethos of this team is to be distinctive, deliberate and disruptive within an inclusive environment. It has large ambitions.

Key Accountabilities
- Develop and maintain software services to support gameplay, data sharing, and title instrumentation.
- Develop and maintain client (game) side library’s to interface with server/cloud hosted services.
- Work with IT infrastructure engineers to onboard and maintain services.
- Mentor junior engineers in service development and maintenance.
- Affect gameplay engineers to ensure game supports synchronous, remote multiplayer modes.
- Implement game state synchronization.
- Understand and refine game & customer behaviour requirements by working with non-engineering disciplines.
- Implement in-game telemetry and reporting mechanism.
- Understand and create data storage and reporting system to deliver relevant game & customer behaviour reports to non-engineering disciplines.
- Affect IT infrastructure decisions to support the above.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Essential Experience
- Previous server experience on at least one service.

Personal Attributes/Interpersonal Skills
- Motivation, drive and problem solving are the most sort after skills.
- Ability to turn change into opportunity.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills.
- Outgoing and pro-active personality who thrives working within a team.
- Self-motivated with a drive for excellence.

Technical/Functional Skills
- Excellent C++ / C# or Java server architecture, programming and debugging skills.
- Strong SQL architecture, programming and debugging skills using modern C++.
- Solid understanding of design and development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and/or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
- Solid understanding of database design and performance tuning.
- XML and JSON data formats, as well as REST protocols.
- Game server code
- Cloud development (Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine or equivalent.
- Ability to complete tasks in a timely manner, achieving compromises with other disciplines as required to hit deadlines.

Personal Attributes/Interpersonal Skills
- Excellent oral and written communication skills.
- Outgoing and pro-active personality who thrives on working within a team.
- Self-motivated with a drive for excellence.

Special Requirements/Additional Information e.g. Language Skills
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and supports workforce diversity
Microsoft’s privacy statement can be viewed on the following web page: http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/default.mspx
Salary Competitive Salary + Bonuses + Benefits
Date posted 22/03/2013
Recruiter This job is advertised on behalf of Microsoft Studios (UK) using their internal reference 830568-106799.
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