Associate Technical Director

Location:

Cambridge, UK – This position offers flexible working options, including predominantly remote work. Applicants are ideally based (or willing to relocate) within a comfortable commuting distance of our office to attend onsite as required.

Want to shape the technology that connects players to Jagex, from accounts and payments through to our launcher, website and player support services?

As an Associate Technical Director within Player Platform team, you’ll provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams responsible for some of the critical systems behind our players’ experience. Working across our website, launcher, payments and subscriptions, accounts and identity, player support and player trust, you’ll set technical direction, guide our Lead Engineers and provide clear ownership for the complex technical decisions that keep these services moving.

This is a leader-of-leaders opportunity with a distinctive technical challenge: evolving and integrating modern technology alongside systems that have grown over more than two decades. You’ll help teams balance scalability, maintainability, resilience, technical debt and delivery, while shaping the standards and technical strategy that support the future of our Player Platform.

• Define the technical strategy for your area alongside the Director of Player Platform and your fellow Associate Technical Directors, then translate it into actionable objectives and key results with your Lead Engineers so every team knows what they are building towards and why.
• Guide the architecture and evolution of complex systems across payments and subscriptions, accounts and identity, web and launcher, making balanced calls on scalability, maintainability, resilience, cost and technical debt against what the business needs next.
• Own the engineering principles and standards for your area in line with Jagex's wider architecture principles, working with Lead Engineers to embed them in day to day work, offering practical examples rather than theory, and reporting exceptions to senior leadership.
• Grow your Lead Engineers and their teams through coaching, mentoring, candid feedback and clear objectives, closing technical leadership gaps and raising the engineering capability of the whole area.
• Work side by side with product and business leaders, translating their vision into high level technical options and explaining trade offs and risks in language everyone in the room can follow.
• Own technology across its full lifecycle, from evaluation and procurement through operation, modernisation and decommissioning of both internally built and off the shelf systems, including budget accountability for SaaS platforms and outsourced capacity.
• Manage the relationship with our outsourced engineering partners, holding them to the same bar for technical quality and delivery as our internal teams.
• Be the domain expert for your area's technology, fielding the hardest technical questions yourself, championing quality across web, test, backend and cloud infrastructure, and making sure knowledge is shared so no single person becomes a dependency.

• Significant experience leading multiple engineering teams to deliver and operate complex, business critical software systems, with accountability for priorities, dependencies, risks, resources, budgets and delivery outcomes. Experience in enterprise or large scale platform environments is particularly relevant, and games industry experience is not required.
• Proven experience managing and developing senior technical leaders, with accountability for performance, succession, workforce planning and raising engineering capability across your teams.
• A strong track record of defining technical strategy, establishing and evolving engineering standards, and turning strategic direction into clear, measurable technical objectives.
• Demonstrable experience guiding the architecture and evolution of complex systems, including situations where modern technology had to work alongside long established or legacy platforms, and experience owning technology through evaluation, procurement, modernisation and…