{"id":676141,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer","title":"Staff Systems Software Engineer","company":{"id":7044,"name":"thatgamecompany","domain":"thatgamecompany.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/thatgamecompany","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":33,"ghost_share":0.273,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":70,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Los Angeles, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":162500,"max":219000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":219000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Chaos Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"CMake","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Gatling","optional":false},{"name":"GCC","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"GitLab","optional":false},{"name":"GitLab CI","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Groovy","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"JMeter","optional":false},{"name":"k6","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Locust","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTofu","optional":false},{"name":"Podman","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"TCP/IP","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Ansible","optional":true},{"name":"C","optional":true},{"name":"Java","optional":true},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":true},{"name":"SLURM","optional":true},{"name":"Swift","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true},{"name":"Windows","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-09T17:34:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T09:11:23Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":50,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":49},"description":"Staff Systems Software Engineer\nRemote US & Canada\nAbout this role\nMost engineering roles at Thatgamecompany ship features to players. This one ships velocity and quality to engineers. Cloud, Gameplay Backend, and Cross-Platform Backend build the services and features the game runs on; you build the systems that prove that work is correct, fast, and ready - before it reaches players. You will build the systems that prove the gameplay feature works - at scale, on every device, on every commit - and the infrastructure that lets a hundred engineers find that out in minutes instead of days. If it runs in production, another team owns it. If it exists to test, measure, or accelerate what those teams build - test harnesses, load/chaos infrastructure, device labs, build/GPU clusters - you own it. Your output is the studio's velocity and the game's quality floor.\nOn any given day, you might:\nProve correctness and quality before players find the bugs\nBuild and own the studio's functional test automation framework - runner, fixtures, game-state harness, reporting - plus coverage instrumentation that makes untested systems visible\n\nBuild regression analysis tooling that separates real regressions from noise and attributes them to a commit automatically\n\nImprove test suite speed/trust via flake detection, quarantine, parallel sharding, deterministic replay\n\nFind the breaking point on purpose\nDesign load/stress testing systems modeling realistic player behavior, capable of driving launch-scale synthetic traffic against pre-production\n\nBuild chaos testing capability - fault injection, latency/partition simulation, dependency failure - run safely against real infrastructure\n\nRun disaster recovery exercises, measure actual RTO/RPO vs. stated targets, and turn findings into permanent regression tests\n\nProve quality on real devices\nBuild app quality testing automation - frame time, memory, thermal, battery, cold-start captured automatically and gated in CI\n\nOwn the device compatibility lab, orchestration, and certification matrix so device support is verified every commit, not the week before ship\n\nOwn the infrastructure engineers build on\nBuild/operate on-prem build clusters (distributed compilation, caching, artifacts) and on-prem GPU clusters (scheduling, multi-tenancy, utilization), backing buy-vs-build with real data\n\nDesign cross-platform developer tools - including AI-assisted tooling (agents, skills, MCP servers) - that reduce toil across Cloud, Backend, and Client Engineering\n\nMake it land\nDefine, instrument, and publish developer velocity/quality metrics (build time, test cycle time, flake rate, escaped defect rate, MTTR) and use them to prioritize your roadmap\n\nDrive adoption across teams that don't report to you\n\nMentor engineers in testing strategy, performance analysis, systems thinking\n\nRaise the bar through code review, documentation, reducing bus factor\n\nWe expect you to\nBe a passionate gamer who puts players first\n\nTreat developer experience as a product - users, adoption curves, a quality bar - not internal plumbing\n\nOperate at Staff level: set technical direction studio-wide, influence without authority\n\nBe relentless about systems that prevent problems, not just report them\n\nEmbrace experimentation for ambiguous, complex problems\n\nCommunicate trade-offs clearly across distributed teams\n\nRequired Skills\nLanguages: Python, Golang, C/C++, Jenkins Groovy; Linux shell scripting; fluent English\n\nTesting & Quality Systems: Test framework design; load/stress tooling (k6, Locust, Gatling, JMeter); fault injection/chaos engineering; coverage instrumentation; flake detection\n\nPerformance & Analysis: CPU/GPU/memory/I/O profiling; statistical analysis of noisy benchmarks; regression detection and commit attribution; observability\n\nBuild & CI at Scale: Jenkins/GitLab CI/CD; Make/CMake; GCC/Clang; distributed build systems/caching; Git/GitLab and Perforce (large-binary workflows)\n\nInfrastructure: Linux/macOS administration; bare-metal/on-prem cluster ops; Docker/Podman; Kubernetes; Terraform/OpenTofu; hardware capacity planning\n\nSystems Fundamentals: Distributed systems failure modes; TCP/IP and UDP; resilience patterns; disaster recovery planning and execution\n\nPreferred Skills\nMobile device farm operation, Android/iOS build and profiling toolchains, GPU cluster scheduling (Slurm, K8s device plugins, MIG), game engine internals/engine-level test automation, deterministic simulation/replay testing, live service game experience (or SaaS/PaaS/XaaS equivalent), Windows administration, Ansible, TypeScript/Java/Kotlin/Swift, hybrid/multi-cloud management\nPerks:\nPaid Time Off, Holidays and Two Weeks Winter Break\n\nEmployees and their dependents get medical, dental, and vision coverage, regardless of their level, tenure, or position within the company. Moreover, these benefits start on the first day of the job-there’s no waiting period before they kick in.\n\nPet Insurance for those who need it too.\n\nCompassionate leave for employees who needs to take care of their family members\n\nPre-tax wellness stipend\n\nPre-tax work from home stipend\n\nAccess our savings plan (401K program) with company match\n\nMental health resources including Headspace membership and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)\n\nDiscount portal for everyday goods and services\n\nEmployee inclusive and diversity initiatives such as Grow Together\n\nSupport for personal professional development\n\nWe look forward to meeting you!\nApplicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.\nThe salary range for this position is $162,500 USD to $219,000 USD annually, with the opportunity to earn an annual discretionary bonus. This salary range is an estimate, and the actual salary may vary based on the Company’s compensation practices. Employees in this position are eligible to participate in the Company’s standard employee benefit programs, which currently include the following: medical, dental, vision, 401k, and paid time off.\nOur base pay is benchmarked against regional market and industry data and is adjusted to reflect the cost of living in your specific geographic area.\n#LI-Remote","description_format":"text","description_chars":6220,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Advanced (C1)","optional":false}]},"benefits":["401k plan","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Gaming"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-10T22:57:22Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 2 · green card filings: 1","filings_12m":2,"filings_prev_12m":1,"green_card_filings_12m":1,"median_offered_wage_usd":115833,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":60,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.807,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":50,"expected_fill_days":70,"reasons":["conf:1","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":219000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T12:30:32Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":17913,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7044},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7044"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/thatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthatgamecompany-staff-systems-software-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":676141}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"thatgamecompany.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":676141},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}