Electronic Arts: UX/UI Software Engineer II (University Grad) – Austin, TX

What a UX/UI Software Engineer does at EA:

EA Player Reliability Engineering (PRE) UX/UI Software Engineers dive deep into code and work as part of a team of programming experts who define and solve big problems and build powerful automation tools. Our Engineers ensure stellar product quality and provide technical guidance to Product Managers as they communicate user needs and product requirements. This role is for a developer who loves the challenge of building distributed, high availability, and resilient systems. The developer should have strong design and coding skills in building APIs and have a command of OS (Linux and Windows), container (Docker), and Hypervisor programming models.

We intend to build and expose IaaS/PaaS capabilities via service catalogs (UIs and their corresponding REST APIs). The infrastructure management platform we’re building hosts large-scale, globally distributed, secure, resilient, high performance and compliant backend, and game services. We’re building monitoring, metering, and instrumentation packages into our services. As EA Digital Platform, we follow an agile development process and drive E2E execution starting from owning the code from inception to running it in production.

The next great EA PRE Engineer also needs to be a:

A recent graduate (last 6 months) of a Bachelor or Master’s program in computer science or related field. Master’s degree preferred.
Knowledge of distributed, network, and systems programming in Linux/Unix environments.
Experience taking projects from initial spec/requirements through design and implementation, testing and debugging, documentation, and installation
Required expertise in Angular, Python, Goes, or Java
Programming in a private cloud infrastructure is a big plus
Strong written and oral communication skills are essential

UX/UI Software Engineer II (University Grad) Job Responsibilities:

Build core components for a flexible dashboard as a service utility that will help people across EA better understand our data
Help create a style guide and accompanying framework/CSS to help the rest of our team speak a common visual language with their work
Work with PMs to design and build monitoring service catalog UI and APIs
Work with the cloud platform-specific APIs to automate the provisioning of tooling as above
Use machine learning techniques such as Bayesian Inference, HMM, and Neural networks to create intelligent monitoring algorithms for alerting on service level issues
Write unit tests for automation code, and achieve 80%+ code coverage
Write build verification tests (BVTs) in virtual machine environments to verify correct operation of the automated monitoring components
Review code via collaborative code review tools with peers
Write and maintain documentation for the components
Effectively communicate progress and issues

We are EA:

And we make games. In fact, we entertain millions of people across the globe with the most amazing and immersive interactive software in the industry. But making games is hard work. That’s why we employ the most creative, passionate people in the industry.

The Challenge Ahead of UX/UI Software Engineer II (University Grad) Jobs:

Our team is responsible for improving online gameplay across all of EA’s titles by leveraging the latest techniques in data science to turn patterns in poor player experiences into actionable insights. We are looking for UX/UI designers with solid backgrounds in Computer Science to help us:

Build world-class data visualization tools to help EA provide the best player experience possible
Collaborate across EA to build and evangelize a library of consistent and repeatable reliability metrics
Provide actionable insights and real-time alerts on issues impacting player experience
Drive improvements in reaction and remediation time for player impacting incidents by improving operational collaboration across EA

Bonus points if you:

Have experience with Apache Storm, Kafka, AMQP, Graphite, or any NoSQL platforms (Hadoop or Cassandra preferred)
Have contributed to open source projects in the DevOps/Visualizations space
Have experience with FeedHenry, Ionic, and Node.js
Have ever attended a course taught by Edward Tufte

What’s in it for you UX/UI Software Engineer II (University Grad)? Glad you asked!

We love to brag about our great perks like comprehensive health and benefits packages, tuition reimbursement, 401k with company match and, of course, free video games. And since we realize it takes world-class people to make world-class games, we offer competitive compensation packages and a culture that thrives off of creativity and individuality. At EA, we live the “work hard/play hard” credo every day.

EA is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, age, sexual orientation, marital status, protected veteran status, medical condition or disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.

About Electronic Arts

To armchair quarterbacks and couch-potato commandos, Electronic Arts (EA) is their Picasso. EA is a top-three global video game publisher with popular titles such as Battlefield, Madden NFL, The Sims, and Need for Speed. The company also distributes third-party titles such as Rock Band and Valve Software’s Left 4 Dead, and it publishes games based on other media franchises such as Harry Potter. EA develops its games for consoles from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, as well as for PCs. EA also serves mobile devices, including e-readers, and provides online social games, including Hasbro-licensed games such as Monopoly, via websites Pogo and Playfish. Most of EA’s sales are divided between North America and Europe.

As EA pursues a digital approach, its structure morphs along with it. The company now divides operations into various labels: EA Games (Battlefield, Dead Space, Medal of Honor, Need for Speed), EA SPORTS (Tiger Woods, Fight Night, FIFA), BioWare (Mass Effect, Star Wars, Dragon Age), Maxis (Sims, Spore), recently acquired PopCap Games (Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, Zuma), and social and mobile studios (EA Mobile, Playfish, Pogo). The company’s social and mobile efforts entail free-to-play social games produced for sites such as Facebook, Google, Bebo, MySpace, as well as for Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iPhone.

Whether digital or physical, product revenues still drive the business, but EA’s digital focus also means growing service revenue (less than 20% of sales). Service revenue includes games and content that require hosting support for the essential game experience, as well as recurring subscriptions.

For fiscal 2012 (ended March), EA finally turned around two consecutive years of revenue decline, thanks to paying off in its digital aspirations. Digital sales climbed nearly 50%, outweighing the marginal dip in publishing. Major title contributors to product revenue, which rose 7%, were FIFA 12 (13% of overall sales) and Battlefield 3 (11%), Madden NFL 12, and Crysis. Service revenue increase of nearly 80% was driven by BioWare’s online role-playing action game Star Wars: The Old Republic, microtransactions from The Sims Social, and the FIFA Ultimate Team add-on service.

Although it’s pressing hard to be predominantly a digital publisher, EA’a largest single customers are still retailers, the two biggest being GameStop (15% of sales) and Wal-Mart (now less than 10%). The company, however, increasingly looks to mobile and third-party e-commerce marketplaces, and more so its own e-commerce platform, Origin, which also offers titles from other publishers such as SEGA.

Like most of its competitors, EA has responded to industry struggles by culling its catalog to focus on titles that generate the most revenue. In line with its digital transformation, those games are now designed to include additional online features, where they used to have few or none. In 2009 EA published more than 60 titles, practically devoid of online options, in the packaged goods format, but plans only 14 for 2013, each with an online component. Social and mobile platforms will be where it attacks with volume, slating in excess of 40 titles for release.

In tandem with its strategy to offer fewer titles for consoles and PC, EA also hopes to make them year-round revenue generators, and taking a cue from Hollywood, seeks to develop and maintain brands that can produce sequels. Its sports games, for example, typically are iterated on a yearly basis, while others, such as Battlefield and The Sims, receive new installments less frequently.

Electronic Arts Salaries

How much does Electronic Arts pay?
The average Electronic Arts salary ranges from approximately $32,000 per year for a Quality Assurance Manager to $210,000 per year for Senior Supervisor. Average Electronic Arts hourly pay ranges from approximately $8.30 per hour for Quality Assurance Tester to $56.39 per hour for Automation Engineer. Salary information comes from 66 data points collected directly from employees, users, and jobs on Indeed.

Job Title UX/UI Software Engineer II (University Grad)
Location Austin, TX

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