Staff Systems Software Engineer

Remote US & Canada

About this role

Most engineering roles at Thatgamecompany ship features to players. This one ships velocity and quality to engineers. Cloud, Gameplay Backend, and Cross-Platform Backend build the services and features the game runs on; you build the systems that prove that work is correct, fast, and ready - before it reaches players. You will build the systems that prove the gameplay feature works - at scale, on every device, on every commit - and the infrastructure that lets a hundred engineers find that out in minutes instead of days. If it runs in production, another team owns it. If it exists to test, measure, or accelerate what those teams build - test harnesses, load/chaos infrastructure, device labs, build/GPU clusters - you own it. Your output is the studio's velocity and the game's quality floor.

On any given day, you might:

Prove correctness and quality before players find the bugs

• Build and own the studio's functional test automation framework - runner, fixtures, game-state harness, reporting - plus coverage instrumentation that makes untested systems visible
• Build regression analysis tooling that separates real regressions from noise and attributes them to a commit automatically
• Improve test suite speed/trust via flake detection, quarantine, parallel sharding, deterministic replay

Find the breaking point on purpose

• Design load/stress testing systems modeling realistic player behavior, capable of driving launch-scale synthetic traffic against pre-production
• Build chaos testing capability - fault injection, latency/partition simulation, dependency failure - run safely against real infrastructure
• Run disaster recovery exercises, measure actual RTO/RPO vs. stated targets, and turn findings into permanent regression tests

Prove quality on real devices

• Build app quality testing automation - frame time, memory, thermal, battery, cold-start captured automatically and gated in CI
• Own the device compatibility lab, orchestration, and certification matrix so device support is verified every commit, not the week before ship

Own the infrastructure engineers build on

• Build/operate on-prem build clusters (distributed compilation, caching, artifacts) and on-prem GPU clusters (scheduling, multi-tenancy, utilization), backing buy-vs-build with real data
• Design cross-platform developer tools - including AI-assisted tooling (agents, skills, MCP servers) - that reduce toil across Cloud, Backend, and Client Engineering

Make it land

• Define, instrument, and publish developer velocity/quality metrics (build time, test cycle time, flake rate, escaped defect rate, MTTR) and use them to prioritize your roadmap
• Drive adoption across teams that don't report to you
• Mentor engineers in testing strategy, performance analysis, systems thinking
• Raise the bar through code review, documentation, reducing bus factor

We expect you to

• Be a passionate gamer who puts players first
• Treat developer experience as a product - users, adoption curves, a quality bar - not internal plumbing
• Operate at Staff level: set technical direction studio-wide, influence without authority
• Be relentless about systems that prevent problems, not just report them
• Embrace experimentation for ambiguous, complex problems
• Communicate trade-offs clearly across distributed teams

Required Skills

• Languages: Python, Golang, C/C++, Jenkins Groovy; Linux shell scripting; fluent English
• Testing & Quality Systems: Test framework design; load/stress tooling (k6, Locust, Gatling, JMeter); fault injection/chaos engineering; coverage instrumentation; flake detection
• Performance & Analysis: CPU/GPU/memory/I/O profiling; statistical analysis of noisy benchmarks; regression detection and commit attribution; observability
• Build & CI at Scale: Jenkins/GitLab CI/CD; Make/CMake; GCC/Clang; distributed build systems/caching; Git/GitLab and Perforce (large-binary workflows)
• Infrastructure: Linux/macOS administration; bare-metal/on-prem cluster ops; Docker/Podman; Kubernetes; Terraform/OpenTofu; hardware capacity planning
• Systems Fundamentals: Distributed systems failure modes; TCP/IP and UDP; resilience patterns; disaster recovery planning and execution

Preferred Skills

Mobile device farm operation, Android/iOS build and profiling toolchains, GPU cluster scheduling (Slurm, K8s device plugins, MIG), game engine internals/engine-level test automation, deterministic simulation/replay testing, live service game experience (or SaaS/PaaS/XaaS equivalent), Windows administration, Ansible, TypeScript/Java/Kotlin/Swift, hybrid/multi-cloud management

Perks:

• Paid Time Off, Holidays and Two Weeks Winter Break
• Employees and their dependents get medical, dental, and vision coverage, regardless of their level, tenure, or position within the company. Moreover, these benefits start on the first day of the job-there's no waiting period before they kick in.
• Pet Insurance for those who need it too.
• Compassionate leave for employees who needs to take care of their family members
• Pre-tax wellness stipend
• Pre-tax work from home stipend
• Access our 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 such as Grow Together
• Support for personal professional development

We look forward to meeting you!

The salary range for this position is $162,500 USD to $219,000 USD annually, with the opportunity to earn an annual discretionary bonus. This salary range is an estimate, and the actual salary may vary based on the Company's compensation practices. Employees in this position are eligible to participate in the Company's standard employee benefit programs, which currently include the following: medical, dental, vision, 401k, and paid time off.

Our base pay is benchmarked against regional market and industry data and is adjusted to reflect the cost of living in your specific geographic area.

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