Technical Director, Live Games

Big Viking Games • Toronto, ON

25d • CA$180,000 - CA$220,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

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 with a split of roughly 75% hands-on engineering and 25% technical leadership. The role involves being in the codebase most of the week, aligning engineers, making architectural decisions, improving technical standards, supporting engineering growth, and helping teams move in the same direction. The Technical Director will report to the Head of Engineering and work alongside the Engineering Manager, focusing on architecture, technical standards, system quality, modernization, and critical decisions for live games. The work spans the full stack, including TypeScript, HTML5, WebGL, Java, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS. It also covers multiple live products and shared platform services, requiring both depth and leverage in technical decision-making and modernization without disrupting existing player experiences. The role also involves actively adopting agentic engineering workflows, requiring experience in using AI for real engineering tasks beyond simple code completion, including wiring AI into engineering systems, reviewing its output, setting guardrails, and making it useful in production. This is a hybrid role based in Toronto, requiring three days per week in the office.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Haves

• Experience with 2D rendering engines, WebGL 2D pipelines, display-list architectures, sprite graphs, or custom renderers.
• Flash, Flex, or ActionScript heritage.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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, improving mature, valuable, and revenue-generating codebases without breaking player experiences.
• Hold technical quality and consistency across multiple concurrent projects and shared services.
• Ensure architectural decisions are documented, understood, and executable by the team.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed