Associate Technical Director
Jagex: The RuneScape Company
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Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
Jagex: The RuneScape Company in Cambridge, UK, invites an Associate Technical Director to lead the Player Platform teams responsible for launcher, payments, accounts, and identity. You will shape technical direction, set standards, and mentor senior engineers while balancing scalability, resilience, and cost.
You will partner with product and business leaders to translate vision into actionable technical options, shaping the future of our player experience across services and platforms.
Qualifications
- Led multiple engineering teams delivering complex, business-critical software.
- Defined technical strategy and evolved engineering standards.
- Experience guiding architecture with modern and legacy systems.
- Strong communication with product, business, and tech leaders.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical strategy for your area and translate into objectives with Lead Engineers.
- Guide architecture of payments, accounts, web and launcher systems, balancing cost and scale.
- Own engineering principles and embed them in day-to-day work with senior leaders.
- Grow Lead Engineers and teams through coaching and clear objectives.
- Collaborate with product/business leaders to present technical options and risks.
- Own lifecycle management of systems, including procurement, modernization, and decommissioning.
- Manage outsourced partners to meet technical quality and delivery standards.
- Be the domain expert, champion quality, and share knowledge to avoid single points of failure.
Skills
Tools
Job description
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.
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 decommissioning.
- Expert technical knowledge within a relevant engineering domain, with recent proximity to hands on engineering and strong working knowledge of a stack like ours: Java and Spring Boot, TypeScript and React, AWS with EKS and Kubernetes, Terraform, and event driven systems and microservices.
- Proven ability to work with product, business and technology leaders, communicating technical options, trade offs and risks clearly to technical and non technical audiences, including experience managing external engineering partners or suppliers.
- Games industry experience isn't essential. We're equally interested in technical leaders from complex enterprise software environments who can bring mature engineering practices while getting to grips with the systems and challenges unique to Jagex.
When you join Jagex you can look forward to a generous Perks & Benefits package including:
- Private Healthcare, including Dental Plan.
- Discretionary annual performance bonus.
- Minimum 6% Pension contributions.
- Life Insurance.
- Enhanced family leave policies from day 1.
- Flexible working hours.
- 25 days annual leave + Bank holidays & the option to buy/sell holidays + so much more!
We are committed to providing equal opportunities and creating an environment where everyone can thrive. We welcome applications from all backgrounds, and we recruit, develop, and promote based on merit and ability.
If you require any reasonable adjustments to support you during the recruitment process, please let us know when you’re invited to interview.
We are Jagex: The RuneScape Company. Home to one of gaming’s most enduring success stories. We create deep, community-powered games with worlds that evolve, inspire, and endure. Our flagship MMORPG franchise, RuneScape, has welcomed over 300 million player accounts, inspiring generations of players across PC and mobile for 25 years.
As we begin our 26th year, we are accelerating our strategy to expand RuneScape into a broader ecosystem of forever games and connected experiences, grounded in a renewed commitment to integrity and fair play. This includes the reduction of monetisation mechanics, as well as the launch of RuneScape: DragonWilds into Steam Early Access in 2025, representing a major step in building a multi-genre future for the RuneScape universe. We remain focused on building enduring worlds, empowering player-led innovation, and laying the foundations for the boldest era in RuneScape’s history. For more information, visit https://www.jagex.com/ .
Headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom, we are home to passionate creators, storytellers, engineers, and even a few dreamers, all united by a single mission to shape the future of online worlds and empower players to make them their own. We’re looking for people to join us who share our ambitions and values. We foster an inclusive workplace built on trust, autonomy, and a shared passion for creating experiences that inspire our communities. Our values guide everything we do: We Embrace Fellowship by collaborating and sharing openly. We Hone our Craft by always learning and improving; We Honour our Vows by being honest and transparent; We are our Customers’ Heroes by striving to understand our team & player needs, and We Seize The Day by making the most of every opportunity.
Join us. The next era of RuneScape and the next chapter of Jagex: The RuneScape Company starts now.
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