Job Description

About the Hiring Team

=========================

Tencent Games' Venture Lab supports Tencent's third-party (minority stake) studios, working on a diverse range of titles across various genres. Our mission is to elevate these studios' potential from early development to independence by providing comprehensive advisory services across production, publishing, technology, and more.

What the Role Entails

=========================

Tencent Games' Venture Lab is looking for a highly skilled expert to join our team as a Technical Director/Expert in the area of game backend services. You will work closely with studio developers, focusing on providing technical-related advisory and support. This position emphasises a collaborative, advisory role, may require frequent travel, and is responsible for ensuring that our studio partners have the resources and guidance needed to succeed in an ever-evolving and competitive gaming market.
Work with our minority stake portfolio companies to build an understanding of their online services technical direction, related issues and challenges, both remotely and in person as appropriate. Partner with essential portfolio studio team members in a collaborative and constructive way to respectfully guide them towards establishing, elevating, and maintaining backend service quality. For example when there is a need to: 1) Review the technical strategy, technical design, infrastructure choices, and deployment processes of online services that support the studio's games.


2) Introduce best practices and set standards for server-side engineering, system architecture, security, and maintainability.


3) Drive the development and optimization of CI/CD pipelines for rapid, reliable deployment of updates to live game environments.


4) Implement telemetry, analytics, and monitoring tools to provide actionable insights into service performance and user experience.


5) Establish team structures to enable the operational upkeep of live services.


6) Ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations (e.g., data protection, GDPR, COPPA) in the handling of user data and platform services.
Advise and directly assist studios with any challenges encountered in the creation of their services. Develop and maintain a comprehensive knowledge of game backend technologies, tools, services and resources that are available within Tencent and its partners, and use your insights to leverage these to create opportunities for portfolio studios. Use your visibility of common engineering challenges, best practices and solutions derived from engagements with portfolio studios and other case studies in order to synthesise guidance materials, presentations and advice for the benefit of our investees. Remain at the forefront of services engineering development techniques and processes in the games industry.

Who We Look For

===================

Empathy, strong communication skills, and the ability to partner and advise effectively. Experience leading the design and building of microservice-based architectures from the ground up, including a proven track record of launching and maintaining live services at scale, with 100k's of concurrent users or high traffic loads. Leadership experience in setting strategic direction. Outstanding organisational skills and ability. An inquisitive mind and understanding of the latest services technology and trends, with the ability to articulate and advise on their practical application in portfolio game projects. Solid services engineering experience and ability, such as: 1) Experience in designing and operating custom game-specific online services such as matchmaking, leaderboards, lobbies, or gameplay synchronization.


2) Expertise in core services technologies, including database technologies (SQL & NoSQL).


3) Familiarity with identity and access management systems, including OAuth and platform-specific authentication like Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Steamworks.


4) Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools for managing servers and deploying services, and with version control tools (e.g., Git) and CI/CD systems (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, TeamCity).


5) Expertise with hybrid cloud and bare-metal orchestration systems using technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker, and balancing on-premises hardware and cloud resources for optimal cost and performance.


6) Ability to establish live service operations best practices and capabilities. Expertise in setting up monitoring, alerting, and logging systems and defining related incident management workflows, and disaster recovery principles.


7) Hands-on experience with third-party Game Backend-as-a-Service (GBaaS) solutions, evaluating and integrating them when appropriate.


8) Experience developing and scaling web frontends (e.g., with React or similar frameworks) to support game services, dashboards, or user tools.
Familiarity with modern game engines (Unreal Engine, Unity, or proprietary engines), particularly their integration points with back-end services.
#LI-AW1

Equal Employment Opportunity at Tencent

===========================================

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.