Technical Director, Live Games

Role overview

Architecture and modernization

• Own technical direction across live games and shared platform services.
• Lead architectural decisions, 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.
• Ship and maintain full-stack code across TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML5, Java, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS.
• Improve build, test, deployment, local development, tooling, automation, and developer experience.

Agentic engineering

• Lead adoption of agentic tooling in development, testing, review, and software maintenance.
• Build or guide AI-enabled workflows that take action in engineering systems.
• Establish guardrails, review standards, and escalation paths for agent-generated output.
• Move the team from individual AI usage toward repeatable engineering leverage.

Technical leadership

• Align engineers on technical direction through disagreement and raise standards through reviews, documentation, and design practices.
• Support engineer growth and career development with the Engineering Manager.
• Help engineers improve judgment around production risk, system design, quality, maintainability, and tradeoffs.
• Work with the Head of Engineering to align company goals, technical strategy, roadmap requirements, and engineering priorities.

Required experience

• At least 10 years of professional software engineering experience, with recent hands-on experience.
• Significant ownership of architecture or technical direction in production systems.
• Experience with live-service games, high-availability consumer products, real-time systems, or similarly continuously operating software.
• At least 1 year building with agentic coding tools or tool-calling systems that automate real engineering work.
• Experience using AI-enabled engineering systems beyond simple code completion.
• Strong TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML5, and web client engineering experience.
• Java experience sufficient for architectural decisions about a real-time game server.
• PHP experience or clear ability to pick it up quickly and own PHP backend architecture.
• Strong relational database knowledge, especially MySQL or similar systems, including online schema changes.
• Experience with caching, queues, event-driven systems, AWS, Docker, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or similar tooling.
• Strong debugging, refactoring, performance, production troubleshooting, system design, and maintainability skills.

Preferred experience

• Experience with 2D rendering engines, WebGL 2D pipelines, display-list architectures, sprite graphs, or custom renderers.
• Flash, Flex, or ActionScript heritage and experience migrating Flash-era products to HTML5.
• Real-time multiplayer systems involving state synchronization, latency, authority, reconnection, and live session management.
• SmartFoxServer or comparable real-time game server platforms.
• Experience with game economies, virtual goods, player-driven markets, social game systems, live operations, or content pipelines.
• Experience using AI coding agents, tool-calling workflows, or agentic systems in production engineering.

Compensation

• The expected compensation range is CAD 180,000 to CAD 220,000, depending on experience, technical depth, architectural ownership, agentic engineering experience, and overall fit.

Benefits

• Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Health and Wellness spending account and generous time off policies.
• Ownership of architecture behind long-running live-service games and exposure to modernization, agentic workflows, real-time systems, and shared platform services.

Application note

• Applicants should describe a live production system they owned or materially improved, including its challenges, tradeoffs, stability measures, engineering influence, and use of agentic tooling.