// Open Role at Big Viking Games
Lead technical vision and architecture for Big Viking Games' live titles and platform services, driving modernization, engineering standards, and practical AI adoption as a hands-on technical leader.
Toronto, ON
Hybrid, 3 days per week in office
Full-time
Engineering
Reports to: Head of Engineering
Compensation range: CAD $180,000 to $220,000
Big Viking Games is a Canadian gaming company focused on building, operating, and growing long-standing online game communities. Our games have entertained players for years, supported by loyal audiences, live operations, evolving content systems, product innovation, and deep player-driven economies.
We operate long-running live-service virtual worlds with rich in-game economies, virtual goods, social interaction, and player communities that have stayed with the games for years.
We are entering a new phase of modernization and growth, with a focus on stronger engineering discipline, practical AI adoption, improved reliability, better internal tooling, and scalable systems that help our games and teams perform at a higher level.
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. The split is roughly 75% hands-on engineering and 25% technical leadership.
That matters. You will be in the codebase most of the week. The leadership part is real: aligning engineers, making architectural decisions, improving technical standards, supporting engineering growth, and helping teams move in the same direction. But this is not a role for someone stepping back from building.
You will report to the Head of Engineering and work alongside the Engineering Manager, who owns people management and delivery. Your focus will be architecture, technical standards, system quality, modernization, and the decisions that are expensive to get wrong in live games with real players and real revenue.
The work spans the full stack: TypeScript and HTML5 on the client, a custom WebGL rendering layer, Java real-time game servers, PHP backend services, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS.
It also spans multiple live products and the platform services they share. That means this role is about both depth and leverage: making strong technical decisions, holding quality across parallel workstreams, and helping the team modernize without breaking what players rely on.
We are also actively adopting agentic engineering workflows. We are looking for someone who has already put AI to work doing real engineering, not just someone using AI-assisted autocomplete. The right person understands how to wire AI into engineering systems, review its output, set guardrails, and make it useful in production.
This is a hybrid role based in Toronto, with an expectation of working in office three days per week.
Requirements
The ideal candidate is a senior engineer who never stopped building.
They have grown into the person a team turns to when a decision is hard, a system is fragile, or a problem is genuinely complicated. They lead through technical credibility, not title. They can read an old codebase carefully before judging it, and they understand the difference between something that is badly built and something that is simply unfamiliar.
They understand live systems. They know that in a long-running game, the cost of a change includes the risk of it going wrong while players are online. They can modernize without being reckless, and they can protect stability without becoming allergic to change.
They are comfortable aligning engineers through disagreement. They can land a decision, explain the tradeoffs, and get the team moving. They care about engineers getting better and treat that as part of the technical work.
They are also curious about how engineering is changing. They have already put AI and agentic tooling to work doing real engineering, and they want to help define how that becomes a serious part of the development process.
This role is best suited for someone who wants deep technical ownership of live products with real players, real revenue, and a decade of history, plus the mandate to help decide where the technology goes next.
Benefits
The expected compensation range for this role is CAD $180,000 to $220,000, depending on experience, technical depth, architectural ownership, agentic engineering experience, and overall fit.
This posting is for an existing vacancy.
Big Viking Games may use AI-assisted tools at some steps of the recruiting process, including application review support, candidate research, interview preparation, scheduling support, and workflow administration.
AI does not make final hiring decisions. Hiring decisions are made by people.
Every interviewed candidate will be informed of their status within 45 days of their final interview.
Big Viking Games is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment for all candidates. We welcome applications from individuals of all abilities and will provide accommodations throughout the hiring process as needed.
If you require accommodation during the hiring process, please contact hr@bigvikinggames.com so we can work with you to support your needs.
When you apply, tell us about a live production system you owned or materially improved.
We are especially interested in what made the system difficult, what tradeoffs you had to make, how you kept it stable, how you influenced other engineers, and how you have used agentic tooling to do real engineering work.
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with recent hands-on experience.- Significant experience owning architecture or technical direction in production systems.- Experience working on live-service games, high-availability consumer products, or real-time systems.- 1+ year building with agentic coding tools or tool-calling systems that automate real engineering work.- Experience working across multiple concurrent projects while maintaining technical quality and consistency.- Strong TypeScript and JavaScript experience.- Strong HTML5 and web client engineering experience, including browser rendering, asset loading, and performance.- Java experience sufficient to work in and make architectural decisions about real-time game servers.- PHP experience, or ability to quickly pick it up and own architecture in a PHP backend.- Strong understanding of relational databases, especially MySQL, including schema changes in online systems.- Experience with Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, queues, caching, or event-driven systems.- AWS experience and comfort with infrastructure.- 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.- Demonstrated leadership and strong judgment in technical decision-making.