Work at Big Huge

Big Huge Games is searching for a Balance Tester specializing in player vs. player, real-time strategy games, to support our design team in creating top-tier gameplay experiences for millions of players across the globe!

As a Balance Tester you will not only be playing the game, but providing detailed feedback and analysis of gameplay and economy balance, as well as using your competitive gaming skills to offer new strategic possibilities for the game. Potential applicants should excel at PvP RTS games and have extensive experience playing Clash Royale.

Please include a cover letter stating your experience and accomplishments in the gaming community highlighting your experience with RTS games.

Qualifications

• Candidate must have 2+ years experience playing a PvP real-time strategy (RTS) game at a high level, with bonus points for mobile and eSports experience
• In-depth understanding of the mechanics of RTS, with an emphasis on Clash Royale, as well a plus if familiar with classics such as StarCraft 2, Age of Empires and Rise of Nations.
• Deep knowledge of competitive game systems & best practices of mobile games
• Extremely competitive and creative mindset with an eye for the details
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work in both individual and team settings with an appropriate sense of urgency
  

Responsibilities

• Provide feedback from the viewpoint of a highly skilled player
• Written and verbal reports of gameplay and balance concerns
• Analyze and critique game features, economy, and content
• Identify issues and risks within different systems of the game
• Push the strategic possibilities of the game to their limit and beyond
• Become a sponge for ideas and feedback from the team and players

Applicants should download DomiNations on iOS or Android and be prepared to discuss the game.

You will be working closely with the Engineering group, as well as collaborating with other disciplines including Art, Design, Production, and QA. Your work will involve developing and improving our build and deploy systems across all teams and environments. We want engineers that live and breathe tech yet can still operate and communicate effectively in a highly interactive environment.

Responsibilities:

• Develop, maintain, optimize, and document all builds using Team City; adding continuous integration, and unit tests.  This applies to all game team and central tech team projects.
• Help define best practices for source control, continuous integration, automated testing and release management.

• Automate, track all merges across all projects (engineers would take care of merge conflicts).
• Handle all final builds to be deployed for release.  Document and automate associated processes.

• Develop, maintain, and optimize the tracking of current live modules for DomiNations and future live games.
• Improve live deployment system for DomiNations and upcoming games. Work with publisher to install on their end.
• Help in the pre-testing of builds using future OS updates.  Test builds on upcoming iOS/Android/Facebook Gameroom platforms.
• Maintain all build server machines, environments and scripts.
• Handle the generation of build artifacts (such as links to daily build packages) for all builds.
• Work with devs on providing bench marking reports for all builds, which track performance metrics over time such as memory usage, frame rate data, object count, etc.
• Work with Test (SDET) Engineering to go beyond unit testing and enable nightly automated smoke testing of builds, and report results.
• Create tools for internal use to support software engineering best practice

Preferred Skills and Qualifications:

• Expert source control system and branching knowledge, including Git and GitFlow.
• Expertise with scripting languages and build tools, such as bash, powershell, batch, python, perl, MAVEN.
• Experience with related build technologies include package management (npm, NuGet) and binary repositories (Artifactory).
• Extensive Knowledge of different OS, including Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS.
• Knowledge of Unity and mobile development / packaging / deployment.
• Experience with various IDEs and development environments such as Visual Studio, XCode and IntelliJ.
• Implementation Experience with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery processes using various tools like TeamCity, Jenkins/Bamboo, Github, Jira.
• Experience with AWS.
• Familiarity and understanding of C#, .NET, Java, C++.
• Excellent team and interpersonal skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to think quickly and logically to systematically resolve software and hardware related build issues (by analyzing logs, working with other engineers, etc)
• Strong attention to detail and follow-through skills.
• Ability to take direction and catch on quickly.
• Initiative and self-motivation is important.  Must be able to work in a self-directed capacity with the goal of reviewing the current system and proposing tasks and improvements.
  

Located in Baltimore, Maryland, the team at Big Huge Games is heir to a rich tradition of quality game development stretching back more than two decades.

Our goals are simple: make great games, have a great place to come to work every day, and live up to the motto “you gotta have fun to make fun.” Potential applicants should check out DomiNations on iOS or Android.


This a full-time (40hr/week) contract position onsite at our studio in Timonium, MD. No telecommuting or remote work options are available. 

Responsibilities

• Desktop OS/Application Support and troubleshooting for Mac and PC
• Knowledge of, or willingness to learn Linux and to become familiar with cloud services
• Assist in the triage of incoming IT issues
• Creating and maintaining PC system images, deploying new hardware from system images
• Basic account management
• Occasional assembling or moving of light furniture  
• Working with all departments to ensure our teams can continue to make great games

Qualifications

• Solid knowledge of installation and troubleshooting of operating systems and applications
• Proficiency in searching for answers to problems
• Excellent team and interpersonal skills

You will be working closely with client, server and tool programmers, as well as other disciplines including Art, Design, Production, QA and Product.  Your work will involve overseeing, architecting and implementing game technology and features in an efficient, robust and scalable manner, as well as bug fixing, profiling and optimizing code for our target platforms.  We want engineers that live and breathe code yet can still operate and communicate effectively in a highly interactive environment.

Responsibilities:

●       Oversee, architect and help develop high quality game features and foundation technology for mobile platforms, by gathering requirements, designing solutions, implementing robust code, testing and debugging.

●       Work with production and development teams to understand business and system requirements and translate them into technical solutions; develop technical designs, engineering schedules and engine systems; troubleshoot issues.

●       Design, implement and test new and enhanced features to optimize game functionality; assess existing game problems and recommend solutions; document and present solutions to business stakeholders.

●       Lead and mentor other software engineers; code review peer’s and provide constructive feedback to ensure consistency and quality of code.

●       Manage, monitor, prioritize and help resolve live service issues.

●       Evaluate 3^rd party technology and make decisions about developing in-house solutions vs utilizing 3^rd party offerings.

●       Create efficient, scalable, optimized code while working with 3rd party libraries and tools. 

●       Set project-wide engineering budgets for memory and performance within and across game and engine subsystems.

●       Understand, conform and optimize for the memory, performance and budgetary limitations of target hardware and backend services.

●       Lead project and group collaboration efforts and utilize engineering best practices, such as code reviews, automation, testing, etc.

●       Work with all departments and publisher to ensure the best systems and tools to make our teams efficient and our games great.

Preferred Skills and Qualifications:

●       10+ years of software engineering experience.

●       3+ years of lead experience.

●       Extensive game industry experience, shipped previous cross platform titles.  Online game experience preferred.

●       Ability to architect complex systems from scratch.

●       Expert Source control system knowledge with Git.

●       Expert level knowledge of C# and Java, strong C++ knowledge a plus.

●       Excellent team and interpersonal skills a must.

●       Experience with server configuration and management.

●       Extensive experience in creating applications for the cloud (AWS, etc).

●       Expertise working with the Agile/Scrum software development methodology.

●       Strong background in large-scale system development, database design, and network programming.

●       Experience in mentoring and leading other engineers.

●       Expert Unity3D Engine expertise.

●       Extensive Mobile development (iOS/Android).

●       Deep knowledge of 2D games, especially mobile and free to play.

●       Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent engineering track.

●       Ability to quickly understand existing code and enhance/extend an existing architecture.

●       Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

●       Excellent computer science fundamentals in object-oriented design, algorithms, and data structures.

●       Expert level software engineering skills, including the ability to write maintainable and robust code.

●       In-depth experience developing in and supporting all stages of the development lifecycle.

●       A passion for hands-on game development with a focus on attention to detail.

Located in Baltimore, Maryland, the team at Big Huge Games is heir to a rich tradition of quality game development stretching back more than two decades.

Our goals are simple: make great games, have a great place to come to work every day, and live up to the motto “you gotta have fun to make fun.” Potential applicants should check out DomiNations on iOS or Android.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, develop, debug, and update automated functionality tests for DomiNations and future game projects. 
• Communicate with QA teams to develop tools, commands, and utilities that increase the efficiency of the manual QA process. 
• Plan, develop, and debug tools and automation tests for new features and content. 
• Perform team code reviews and architecture reviews and provide mentoring and code feedback to junior engineers
• Provide team leadership bandwidth when needed
• Work with Central Tools team engineers to develop and improve automation frameworks and related technologies

QUALIFICATIONS

• 4+ years of experience in a software engineering/development role
• Strong knowledge of C# is a must
• Experience with Java and Python
• Understanding of Quality Assurance practices and methodologies relating to standalone applications
• Full feature architecture experience or understanding 
• Ability to design and write automation systems for complex features
• Ability to quickly understand existing code and enhance/extend existing architecture 
• Source control system knowledge and usage (Git, Perforce, etc.) 
• Outstanding team, communication, and interpersonal skills 
• A strong passion for gaming and game development is an absolute must

PLUSES

• Degree in Computer Science or equivalent preferred
• Unity3D Engine experience 
• Previous QA testing experience preferred
• Familiar with iOS and Android games/apps
• Experience or familiarity with Amazon services such as EC2 and VPC
• Knowledge of REST and socket based server communication structures

- - PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING POSITION NOTES - - 

 This position does not involve web server, web front-end, or website application automation. This is an onsite position in the vicinity of Baltimore, MD, no remote or 'telecommuting' option is available.

**All applicants MUST include a cover letter containing an overview of how they think automation could be used to more effectively and efficiently test your favorite game.**

The Web Tools Engineer will join our Central Tech group to build tools and pipelines which empower our teams to deliver industry-leading games. You will be working across all disciplines to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and manual processes that can be automated, improved or streamlined.  Once potential improvements have been identified, you will also be responsible for architecting and implementing tool-based solutions. Finally, after deploying and delivering tools, you will continue to iterate with users on our teams to maintain and improve those tools and workflows over time. This is an important and challenging role where you have the opportunity to make a large impact across our studio and product portfolio!   

Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, deploy and maintain tools that empower content, development, product, QA and ops teams to work better, faster and with less possibility of errors.
• Capture and synthesize requirements from multiple teams across different disciplines (Design, Art, QA, Product, Engineering) on what tools are required.
• Be a ‘customer’ focused champion for efficient tool-based content creation, live ops and dev ops.
• Hold regular stakeholder meetings to gather feedback on your tools and make changes as required.
  
  

Preferred Skills and Qualifications:

• Strong oral and written communications with excellent team and interpersonal skills. You must be able to collaborate with team members (both technical and non-technical) at all levels across all disciplines.
• Knowledge and desire for understanding how to build large-scale, high-performance, maintainable software. Ability to architect systems from scratch.
• Expertise in front-end web development as well as back-end web technologies and services (e.g. PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Node.js, React, JQuery, MySQL, ASP.NET).
• Ability to work in a non-traditional web development role, focusing on strong and responsive UX.
• Experience with server side and game development languages and engines (Unity, C#, .NET Core, Java, Redis, Memcached).
• Ability to understand, evaluate and utilize a wide variety of different technologies when architecting tools solutions.  Focus on horizontal application of multiple technologies over a deep vertical slice approach.
• Basic understanding of performance implications of caching, networking, storage, and concurrency.
• Strong computer science fundamentals in object-oriented design, algorithms, and data structures.
• Software engineering skills, including the ability to write maintainable and robust code.
• Experience developing in and supporting all stages of the development lifecycle.
• Familiarity with games and development, especially mobile and free to play.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent engineering track.

Located in Baltimore, Maryland, the team at Big Huge Games is heir to a rich tradition of quality game development stretching back more than two decades.

Our goals are simple: make great games, have a great place to come to work every day, and live up to the motto “you gotta have fun to make fun.” Potential applicants should check out DomiNations on iOS or Android.