Senior Online Software Engineer (Technical Lead) – EA SPORTS FC
EA SPORTS is one of the leading sports entertainment brands in the world, with top-selling videogame franchises, award-winning interactive technology, fan programs, and cross-platform digital experiences. EA SPORTS creates connected experiences that ignite the emotion of sport through industry-leading sports video games, including Madden NFL football, EA Sports FC, NHL® hockey, NBA LIVE basketball, and EA SPORTS UFC.
After nearly 30 years of creating genre-defining, interactive football experiences with the world's biggest football entertainment platform, EA SPORTS FIFA, we are soon beginning a new era. EA SPORTS™ FC will become the future of football from EA SPORTS – as we aim to take global football experiences to new heights, on behalf of football fans everywhere. With more opportunity than ever to create new, authentic experiences that bring joy, inclusivity, and immersion to a global community of fans, we invite you to join us and pioneer the future of football with EA SPORTS!
As the Lead Online Software Engineer, you will lead the Online engineering area for the EA SPORTS™ FC franchise, owning execution against the technical vision and the long-term health of the systems that connect our players at massive scale. You will report to the Technical Director and guide a distributed team of 20+ engineers across multiple locations and time zones, owning the delivery of multiplayer, networking, platform, backend, and live service technologies. Working closely with production, design, QA, platform, security, and other engineering leaders, you will ensure online features are performant, reliable, scalable, secure, and ready for launch and live operations. You will balance strategic leadership with deep technical involvement, helping the team solve complex distributed systems challenges while building a strong engineering culture focused on quality, accountability, collaboration, and player experience.
Your Responsibilities:
Lead the Online engineering area for the EA SPORTS™ FC franchise, acting as the subject matter expert for online systems and driving execution, quality, and long-term system health in alignment with the technical direction set by the Technical Director.
Guide, mentor, and coordinate a distributed team of 20+ engineers across multiple locations and time zones.
Own the delivery of core online systems, including multiplayer networking, matchmaking, sessions, identity, platform services, telemetry, commerce, persistence, backend integrations, and live service infrastructure.
Partnering with production and operations leads to plan, prioritize, and deliver Online features across milestone, launch, and post-launch schedules.
Review and guide technical designs for complex distributed, client/server, peer-to-peer, multithreaded, and real-time multiplayer systems.
Ensure Online systems meet high standards for performance, scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and player experience.
Drive engineering best practices across the team, including technical design reviews, code reviews, testing strategies, documentation, incident prevention, and sustainable development processes.
Identify technical risks early, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and drive mitigation plans across teams and disciplines.
Oversee integration with first-party platform services, third-party APIs, account systems, matchmaking services, telemetry pipelines, and other external online services.
Collaborate with platform teams to ensure compliance with Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and other platform requirements, including certification and online service policies.
Partner with central technology teams across the company to integrate shared backend services, online infrastructure, and internal platform capabilities, ensuring they meet the franchise's technical, production, and player experience needs.
Support launch readiness by driving performance testing, scale testing, reliability reviews, failure-mode planning, and operational readiness for online systems.
Lead the team through live issues, production incidents, and post-launch improvements, ensuring effective investigation, communication, resolution, and follow-up.
Establish clear ownership models, escalation paths, and communication rhythms for a distributed Online engineering team.
Coach engineers on architecture, execution, communication, decision-making, and career growth.
Balance hands-on technical involvement with strategic leadership, stepping into complex architectural, debugging, performance, or production issues when needed.
Foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, collaboration, operational discipline, and player-focused decision-making.
Your Qualifications:
Please note that you do not need to qualify for all requirements to be considered. We encourage you to apply if you can meet most of the requirements and are comfortable opening a dialog to be considered.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education, technical training, and industry experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant hands-on experience with C++ in performance-critical, real-time, or large-scale systems.
5+ years of experience developing online, multiplayer, networking, backend, or distributed systems for games or other real-time interactive products.
3+ years of engineering leadership experience, including leading senior engineers, shaping technical recommendations, reviewing architecture, and driving execution across multiple teams or feature areas.
Proven experience leading an Online, Multiplayer, Networking, Backend, Platform, or Live Services engineering area on a large-scale game or comparable high-traffic consumer product.
Deep understanding of Client/Server, Peer-to-Peer, real-time multiplayer, multithreaded, and asynchronous system architectures.
Strong knowledge of game networking concepts, including latency, bandwidth management, replication, prediction, synchronization, matchmaking, session management, and platform network requirements.
Experience shipping and supporting at least one large-scale multiplayer, live service, or AAA game through production, launch, and post-launch operations.
Experience integrating, owning, or supporting third-party APIs, platform services, account systems, matchmaking services, commerce systems, telemetry, or other external online services.
Experience developing for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo gaming platforms, including familiarity with platform SDKs, certification requirements, and online service constraints.
Strong working knowledge of backend service architecture, distributed systems, databases, caching, scalability, reliability, observability, and operational support.
Working knowledge of relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and in-memory data stores such as Redis.
Practical experience working with dedicated server environments, including build pipelines, deployment workflows, log analysis, crash investigation, and server-side debugging.
Proficiency with modern development, debugging, profiling, and performance analysis tools, including Visual Studio and platform-specific tooling.
Experience using source control and version control systems such as Perforce, Git, or SVN in large multi-branch production environments.
Strong understanding of software engineering principles, coding standards, technical design processes, testing strategies, code review practices, and long-term maintainability.
Demonstrated ability to evaluate high-impact technical options, communicate tradeoffs clearly, balance quality and delivery risk, and align engineering execution with product and player-facing goals.
Excellent cross-discipline communication skills, including experience partnering closely with production, design, QA, security, platform, operations, and other engineering groups.
Proven ability to operate at both strategic and technical levels: helping shape long-term online technology direction in collaboration with the Technical Director, while still being able to dive into complex architectural, performance, reliability, or production issues.