Sparkplay Is Hiring!
Sparkplay Media is a small but well-funded startup developing casual-ish MMOs and social games. We're working outside the publisher system and are backed by the same folks that funded great companies like Tivo and Netflix. Why should you care? Because this translates into an environment in which we as a team have complete creative control over our games and work free from external meddling by corporate drones. At Sparkplay, you're part of a team that's small enough that everybody can (and must) contribute meaningfully. If you're interested in stretching your abilities and being part of a fun, independent team (with competitive salary, stock options, and full benefits) get in touch with us.
Sparkplay's office (which is a former speakeasy!) is in the historic, lively North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Dozens of restaurants, bars, and clubs are located in the surrounding blocks and a park is right across the street.
Senior Designer
Although everyone at Sparkplay is welcome to contribute game ideas, as Senior Designer you'll be touching most or all of our games, though you'll focus on our MMOs.
Responsibilities- Work with designers and engineers on both existing and new games, with a focus on the MMOs.
- Document your designs in a comprehensive, coherent manner.
- Work with more junior designers to improve both their and your skills.
- Take real ownership of the games you work on. Make them your personal passion!
- 4+ years professional games experience
- Massively multiplayer experience a big plus
- Casual experience a plus
- An eagerness to document thoroughly
- Advanced written English and creative writing skills
- Education - Degree level education preferred
- Ability to think like end user
Director of Engineering
As Sparkplay's Director of Engineering, you'll ultimately own the engineering schedule and thus you must be both an excellent manager and a strong coder. You'll lead the engineering team and manage them such that we achieve our engineering goals to schedule, and you'll work with our Lead Architect to maintain and extend a clean, documented platform architecture.
Responsibilities- Lead and manage the engineering team.
- Review code for quality, consistency, and compliance with the TDD.
- Identify technical problems within the projects you work and collaborate with other engineers and leads from design and art to solve them.
- Ensure the overall performance of the project meets with the standards you'll help set.
- Insist upon strong documentation by the engineers you'll manage.
- Help other members of the engineering team on individual tasks that have them stumped.
- Keep the engineering side of the project on schedule.
- Work with other leads (art, design, etc) to ensure there is technical coherency across the company.
- Minimum of 8 years commercial software development experience. Minimum of 6 years games industry experience.
- 2+ shipped game titles with management or lead responsibilities.
- Expert in C++. Expertise in Java a big bonus
- Excellent time management and project management skills
- Very strong general 3D programming background
- Fluent with DirectX 9.0
- Experience with RDBMS systems, MySQL, etc
- Experience on MMOs a bonus
Senior Software Engineer
As Senior Software Engineer you'll work on both architecture and writing great code, touching multiple areas including both client and server-side.
Responsibilities- Help lead and participate in code architecture, primarily on our MMOs.
- Write clean, elegant code efficiently.
- Produce reliable documentation for your work.
- Help more junior engineers become better engineers.
- Minimum of 4 years games industry software development experience
- Fluent C++. Fluent Java a big bonus
- Familiarity with scripting language integration preferred
- Very strong general 3D programming background
- Fluent with DirectX 9.0
- Experience with RDBMS systems, MySQL, etc
- Experience on MMOs a bonus
LAMP Engineer
Experienced PHP/MySQL developer who will work within a game development team to implement consumer-facing web applications and games.
Responsibilities- Develop entertainment-based web applications within a team environment
- Create a robust and reusable base of code, utilizing object-oriented design and template-driven practices
- Produce reliable documentation for your work
- 3-5 years of experience with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).
- Proficiency in AJAX, HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, and SQL.
- Excellent knowledge of database modeling practices
- Strong background in object-oriented programming and design
- Excellent verbal and written English communication skills
- Familiarity with social networking (Facebook, Myspace, etc) is a plus
- Experience dealing with cross-platform/browser issues
Software Engineer
As a software engineer you'll work on writing great code and will be called upon to touch most aspects of our platform and games.
Responsibilities- Write clean, elegant code quickly.
- Participate in code architecture, primarily on our MMOs.
- Produce reliable documentation for your work.
- Minimum of 2 years professional experience writing code (in the games industry or not)
- Strong knowledge of good software development practices
- Good general 3d programming knowledge
- Very strong general 3D programming background
- Fluent C++. Fluent Java a bonus.
- Experience on MMOs a bonus
