The Initiative is looking for an experienced Information Technology (IT) Service Engineer Lead to join our team. This role provides you with an exciting opportunity to bring your organized collaborative skills, have a customer-first mindset, in a continuously evolving production environment. We are looking for an IT Service Engineer Lead who has technical proficiency, to monitor and support our technical and engineering requirements, as it relates to our game development and studio infrastructure. You will support our developers and partners with their day-to-day technical requirements, which may include Perforce deployment and oversight, infrastructure performance optimization, technology integration, engineering support, and asset management. This is a hybrid/remote role with occasional travel to work on site.
At the core of The Initiative, we’re about craft, storytelling, and looking ahead. We seek to shape the future of narrative-driven games by leveraging the most innovative tech and talent from the industry.
On Team Perfect Dark, the multi-studio development team reimagining the sci-fi action-adventure game Perfect Dark, you will be joining a group of developers who have worked on some of the most critically acclaimed games recognized for their excellence, technology, visuals, gameplay, and narrative.
The Initiative, headquartered in Santa Monica and fully distributed, is a 1 st party Microsoft Xbox Game Studio. This is an opportunity to join a studio to work alongside a talented, inclusive team working on the rebirth of this beloved game and franchise – Perfect Dark!
Qualifications:
Required/Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, service engineering, or systems engineering
- OR equivalent experience.
- 3+ years of experience in enterprise administration, specifically with Windows Server 2019/2022, Active Directory, and on-prem virtualization setup and configuration.
- 2+ years of experience in cloud administrative experience with Cloud technologies.
- 3+ years of experience in designing, developing, and testing complex infrastructure solutions that support distributed software development while ensuring security, scalability, and reliability.
Additional or Preferred Qualifications
- 2+ years of proficient experience in all aspects of Perforce within a game development enterprise setting.
- 2+ years of experience in delivering advanced support for Windows 10 or 11 workstations in an enterprise setting.
- 2+ years of experience in configuring and troubleshooting a hybrid enterprise network, including maintaining cloud network environments, regional ISPs and on-prem network topologies.
- Service engineering and IT Operations experience within a game development studio.
Service Engineering IC4 – The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $112,000 – $218,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $145,800 – $238,600 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form .
Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.
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Responsibilities:
Service Engineering – 60%
- Administers and develops end-to-end expertise in Perforce service and/or system design, interactions between technology layers and components, functions of infrastructure, and dependencies at scale, and securely.
- Initiates and implements service design by driving efforts within an organization to identify, define, recommend, and build optimal configurations of technology solutions, including Perforce, with considerations for cost management, security, reliability, efficiency, observability, and/or performance of supported products and services.
- Drives technology reviews with the engineering teams that develop and/or manage services, identifying opportunities for efficiencies in operations and sharing learnings and recommendations across engineering and development teams.
- Independently implements reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performance solutions across teams. Contributes to design documents. Owns implementation and rollback plans. Maintains quality checklist and related documentation.
- Proactively identifies and recommends solutions for Perforce deployment and overall infrastructure performance optimization, technology integration, asset management, and workflow across multiple tenants.
- Ensures adherence to and implementation of prescriptive guidance for security and compliance standards in alignment with direction from the business and technical experts. Works with security and compliance teams to identify and address issues relevant for their particular services. Identifies patterns of compliance violations and implements automations for prevention. Provides assistance to other Service Engineers as needed.
Incident Response and Troubleshooting – 20%
- Responds to incidents during regular rotations, including complex issues with co-development partners or internal game developers, by identifying the level of impact, troubleshooting, deploying appropriate fixes to resolve root cause(s), and implementing automations for prevention of recurring issues.
- Contributes to postmortems and shares details related to incidents and their resolution through post-mortem reports and regular review meetings.
- Provides expert incident response assistance to other Engineers and technology teams as needed and develops incident response and resolution guidance.
- Develops scripts and/or automation and leverages an understanding of solutions to define, develop, measure, track, change, and improve the quality of telemetry pipelines that support automated monitoring and incident response.
IT Operations Support and Management – 20%
- Manages a team of system administrators to provide break-fix support for desktop and laptop users internally and across our game development partners.
- Ensures new hire onboarding and off boarding procedures and requirements are met.
- Supports in-studio operating needs including Wi-Fi, conference and meeting room Audio/Visual, networking, fiber connectivity, and server room operations.
- Tracks inventory assets including hardware, software licenses, plug-ins and peripherals.