Technical Director, Live Games
Technical Director, Live Games
Toronto, ON
Hybrid, 3 days per week in office
Full-time
Engineering
Reports to: Head of Engineering
Compensation range: CAD $180,000 to $220,000
About Big Viking Games
Big Viking Games is a Canadian gaming company focused on building, operating, and growing long-standing online game communities. Our games have entertained players for years, supported by loyal audiences, live operations, evolving content systems, product innovation, and deep player-driven economies.
We operate long-running live-service virtual worlds with rich in-game economies, virtual goods, social interaction, and player communities that have stayed with the games for years.
We are entering a new phase of modernization and growth, with a focus on stronger engineering discipline, practical AI adoption, improved reliability, better internal tooling, and scalable systems that help our games and teams perform at a higher level.
About the Role
Big Viking Games is hiring a Technical Director, Live Games to own the technical direction, architecture, and engineering standards across our live titles and the shared platform services they depend on.
This is a senior hands-on technical leadership role. The split is roughly 75% hands-on engineering and 25% technical leadership.
That matters. You will be in the codebase most of the week. The leadership part is real: aligning engineers, making architectural decisions, improving technical standards, supporting engineering growth, and helping teams move in the same direction. But this is not a role for someone stepping back from building.
You will report to the Head of Engineering and work alongside the Engineering Manager, who owns people management and delivery. Your focus will be architecture, technical standards, system quality, modernization, and the decisions that are expensive to get wrong in live games with real players and real revenue.
The work spans the full stack: TypeScript and HTML5 on the client, a custom WebGL rendering layer, Java real-time game servers, PHP backend services, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS.
It also spans multiple live products and the platform services they share. That means this role is about both depth and leverage: making strong technical decisions, holding quality across parallel workstreams, and helping the team modernize without breaking what players rely on.
We are also actively adopting agentic engineering workflows. We are looking for someone who has already put AI to work doing real engineering, not just someone using AI-assisted autocomplete. The right person understands how to wire AI into engineering systems, review its output, set guardrails, and make it useful in production.
This is a hybrid role based in Toronto, with an expectation of working in office three days per week.
What You’ll Do
Own the Architecture
- Own the technical direction across our live games and shared platform services.
- Work with technical leads and senior engineers to plan, evaluate, and execute architectural changes.
- Make or drive alignment on technical decisions that are expensive to reverse.
- Lead significant changes to systems that cannot simply be taken offline, including migrations, protocol changes, schema changes, staged rollouts, and live production improvements.
- Balance modernization against stability. Much of the codebase is mature, valuable, and revenue-generating. The job is improving it without breaking what players rely on.
- Hold technical quality and consistency across multiple concurrent projects and shared services.
- Ensure architectural decisions are documented, understood, and executable by the team.
Build and Modernize
- Ship code across the stack, including TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML5, Java, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS.
- Work on browser-based client systems, custom rendering technology, asset loading, performance, backend services, real-time game systems, and platform integrations.
- Solve complex technical problems in mature, high-value live systems.
- Refactor and extend legacy systems carefully, with a clear understanding of production risk.
- Improve the engineering pipeline, including build, test, deploy, local development, tooling, automation, and developer experience.
- Help make the codebase more maintainable, observable, testable, and easier for both humans and agents to work with.
- Identify high-leverage technical improvements that reduce risk, increase velocity, and improve long-term system health.
Lead Agentic Engineering Adoption
- Push agentic tooling into how we build, test, review, and maintain software.
- Build or guide AI-enabled workflows that take action in engineering systems, not just suggest code.
- Wire AI into parts of the code pipeline where it can safely accelerate work.
- Establish guardrails, review standards, and escalation paths for agent-generated output.
- Review agent-produced code and recommendations as rigorously as you would review a senior engineer’s work.
- Know when to use agentic tooling and when not to.
- Help the team move from individual AI usage to repeatable engineering leverage.
Lead the Technical Craft
- Work with the Head of Engineering to align company goals with technical strategy, roadmap requirements, and engineering priorities.
- Align engineers on technical direction, especially through disagreement.
- Raise the technical bar through code review, architecture review, design standards, documentation, and decision-making discipline.
- Give process feedback that changes how the team works for the better.
- Support engineers’ growth and career development in partnership with the Engineering Manager.
- Help engineers build better judgment around production risk, system design, quality, maintainability, and tradeoffs.
- Bring calm, clarity, and technical credibility to difficult engineering decisions.
Requirements
What You Bring
Experience
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with recent years spent hands-on.
- Significant experience owning architecture or technical direction in production systems.
- Experience working on live-service games, high-availability consumer products, real-time systems, or other software that must keep running while it evolves.
- 1+ year building with agentic coding tools or tool-calling systems that automate real engineering work.
- Experience with systems that take action, such as agents wired into code pipelines, tool integrations, automated diagnosis, automated remediation, production workflows, or AI-assisted engineering systems beyond simple code completion.
- Experience working across multiple concurrent projects or product areas while maintaining technical quality and consistency.
Core Technical Skills
- Strong TypeScript and JavaScript experience.
- Strong HTML5 and web client engineering experience, including browser rendering, asset loading, performance, and real-world network conditions.
- Java experience sufficient to work in and make architectural decisions about a real-time game server.
- PHP experience, or clear evidence that you can pick it up quickly and own architecture in a PHP backend.
- Strong understanding of relational databases, especially MySQL or similar systems, including schema changes in systems that stay online.
- Experience with Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, queues, caching, or event-driven systems.
- AWS experience and comfort understanding the infrastructure your code runs on.
- Experience with Docker, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or similar build and deployment tooling.
- Strong debugging, refactoring, performance, and production troubleshooting skills.
- Strong understanding of system design, integration points, deployment risk, and long-term maintainability.
Leadership and Judgment
- Evidence of aligning engineers on technical direction, including through disagreement.
- Evidence of improving how a team works, not just identifying what is broken.
- Evidence of coaching, mentoring, or developing engineers.
- Comfort setting standards and holding the architectural conversation with people who disagree.
- Strong technical communication with engineers, product, leadership, and non-technical stakeholders.
- Ability to make tradeoffs between speed, quality, player risk, revenue impact, and long-term system health.
- High ownership, low ego, and a strong bias toward practical execution.
Nice to Have
- Experience with 2D rendering engines, WebGL 2D pipelines, display-list architectures, sprite graphs, or custom renderers.
- Flash, Flex, or ActionScript heritage. This is genuinely relevant for us because parts of the client architecture still reflect that history.
- Experience migrating large Flash-era products to HTML5.
- Real-time multiplayer systems, including 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, or social game systems.
- Experience with live operations, event systems, content pipelines, and tools used by production teams.
- Experience in small, high-leverage teams where technical ownership is broad.
- Experience using AI coding agents, tool-calling workflows, or agentic systems as part of a production engineering process.
Ideal Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate is a senior engineer who never stopped building.
They have grown into the person a team turns to when a decision is hard, a system is fragile, or a problem is genuinely complicated. They lead through technical credibility, not title. They can read an old codebase carefully before judging it, and they understand the difference between something that is badly built and something that is simply unfamiliar.
They understand live systems. They know that in a long-running game, the cost of a change includes the risk of it going wrong while players are online. They can modernize without being reckless, and they can protect stability without becoming allergic to change.
They are comfortable aligning engineers through disagreement. They can land a decision, explain the tradeoffs, and get the team moving. They care about engineers getting better and treat that as part of the technical work.
They are also curious about how engineering is changing. They have already put AI and agentic tooling to work doing real engineering, and they want to help define how that becomes a serious part of the development process.
This role is best suited for someone who wants deep technical ownership of live products with real players, real revenue, and a decade of history, plus the mandate to help decide where the technology goes next.
Benefits
Compensation
The expected compensation range for this role is CAD $180,000 to $220,000, depending on experience, technical depth, architectural ownership, agentic engineering experience, and overall fit.
Benefits
- Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation.
- Comprehensive benefits package, including health, dental, and vision coverage.
- Health and Wellness spending account.
- Generous time off policies.
- Ownership of the architecture behind long-running live-service games with established player communities.
- A senior technical seat with a real mandate, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering.
- Exposure to modernization, agentic engineering workflows, real-time systems, shared platform services, and live-game technology.
Hiring Process and AI Disclosure
This posting is for an existing vacancy.
Big Viking Games may use AI-assisted tools at some steps of the recruiting process, including application review support, candidate research, interview preparation, scheduling support, and workflow administration.
AI does not make final hiring decisions. Hiring decisions are made by people.
Every interviewed candidate will be informed of their status within 45 days of their final interview.
Accessibility and Accommodation
Big Viking Games is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment for all candidates. We welcome applications from individuals of all abilities and will provide accommodations throughout the hiring process as needed.
If you require accommodation during the hiring process, please contact [email protected] so we can work with you to support your needs.
Application Note
When you apply, tell us about a live production system you owned or materially improved.
We are especially interested in what made the system difficult, what tradeoffs you had to make, how you kept it stable, how you influenced other engineers, and how you have used agentic tooling to do real engineering work.