Lead Online Software Engineer - EA Sports FC

Summary

Electronic Arts creates next‑level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. The EA SPORTS division delivers high‑profile sports‑entertainment brands through award‑winning interactive technology and cross‑platform digital experiences.

• 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 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.
• Partner 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.

• 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…