Sr. Network / Server Programmer

Description

What's It All About:
You are driven to solve difficult architectural challenges in the design and implementation of server clusters and client/server game programming. You enjoy figuring out how to get the most out of multi processor servers and limited bandwidth to support great online gameplay. You are comfortable with complicated multi-threaded environments and asynchronous network code and understand the complexities of highly scalable server architectures.

A Typical Day:
You’ve just reconfigured the network protocol to support reliable transport over UDP, now it’s time to test it. You’ve previously created a graphic-less game client that you can use to send well formed and not so well formed packets to your new network layer, running several test protocols to ensure the new transport layer works as intended. Since things seem to be running smoothly, its now time to start adapting the client to support load testing by creating thousands of connections to your new server, the ultimate test before releasing the new code into the daily build.

Who You Work With the Most:
Since your work is so central to the game, you end up supporting many designers and programmers on small, multidisciplinary teams to implement gameplay, combat, and many other features. You also work closely with IT to help design the datacenters that will host the game, and you are often mentoring new programmers who have to learn the complexities of the systems you have created.