Description & Requirements
Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. Here, everyone is part of the story. Part of a community that connects across the globe. A place where creativity thrives, new perspectives are invited, and ideas matter. A team where everyone makes play happen.
Tech Lead
Electronic Arts | Austin, USA
About Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts Inc. is a global leader in interactive entertainment. EA delivers games, content, and online services for Internet-connected consoles, personal computers, mobile phones, and tablets to millions of players around the world.
The Challenge Ahead
The IT Player Experience Engineering team builds platforms and services that support critical player-facing experiences at scale. As a Technical Lead, you will be responsible for driving delivery excellence across multiple initiatives by owning planning, execution, stakeholder alignment, quality, delivery speed, and continuous improvement.
This role is critical to ensuring predictable, high-quality delivery while enabling engineering teams to operate efficiently and at scale.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Lead technical direction for the Core Platform track, including feature enhancements and system upgrades across a distributed team.
- Partner with Product Owners and stakeholders to gather requirements, translate them into technical designs, and define clear API interfaces and integration contracts.
- Design and evolve distributed systems and Java microservices using resilient patterns such as timeouts, retries, idempotency, and circuit breakers, plus safe contract and versioning practices.
- Guide enterprise integration approaches including synchronous and asynchronous patterns, event-driven workflows, and orchestration versus choreography, including Salesforce Service Cloud and DW integrations.
Planning, Execution & End-to-End Delivery
- Convert roadmap and requirements into an executable delivery plan including milestones, dependencies, sequencing, and risk management.
- Work closely with engineers to drive end-to-end delivery from design through implementation, testing, rollout, and post-release follow-through, removing blockers and ensuring high execution quality.
- Be the voice of the distributed engineering team by surfacing risks early, aligning on tradeoffs, and keeping delivery predictable.
Release Readiness & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Coordinate with Product Owners, QA, UAT, Design, DW, SRE, and dependent engineering teams to ensure releases are low-risk and well-orchestrated.
- Own release readiness including change planning, runbooks, go or no-go criteria, rollout and rollback strategy, and clear stakeholder communication.
- Ensure environments, test data, and sign-off workflows are aligned ahead of release windows.
Quality, QA & UAT Excellence
- Establish and uphold a quality bar across unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, contract testing, and regression strategy.
- Drive disciplined defect triage and prioritization with QA and UAT partners to reduce escape defects.
- Strengthen CI/CD quality gates and automation to prevent regressions and deployment issues.
Cloud Engineering, Cost Optimization & Operational Excellence
- Partner with SRE to plan and execute cloud engineering work including deployments, scaling, reliability improvements, and incident readiness.
- Drive cost optimization and efficiency through right-sizing, capacity planning, smarter scaling, and reducing operational toil.
- Improve observability using Grafana and OpenSearch with actionable dashboards, alert hygiene, and operational KPIs.
Automation & Modern Tooling
- Use Python and workflow automation such as n8n to streamline release readiness, reporting, and operational workflows.
- Apply practical AI and LLM-assisted automation to reduce toil and improve decision-making, such as release checks and risk signals, with appropriate guardrails.
What We’re Looking For
Education & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend and platform systems
- Proven Tech Lead experience driving end-to-end delivery and mentoring engineers
- Experience partnering with Product Owners and stakeholders to gather requirements and translate them into technical designs
Backend, Integrations & Quality
- Strong hands-on experience building Java microservices
- Solid understanding of distributed systems and resilient design patterns.
- Good understanding of enterprise integration patterns including synchronous, asynchronous, and event-driven approaches
- Experience defining REST APIs from scratch including versioning, security, and documentation, plus disciplined test coverage
- Strong understanding of QA and UAT including test strategy, regression planning, defect triage, test data and environment readiness, and sign-off readiness
- Strong experience integrating with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce Service Cloud and data systems including DW dependencies
- Ability to build automation and AI solutions using Python, workflow orchestration such as n8n (or equivalent), and LLMs to streamline workflows across planning, delivery, QA/UAT readiness, and operations, with depth in prompt engineering, RAG, evaluation, and responsible AI guardrails (fine-tuning a plus).
Cloud, CI/CD & Observability
- Experience delivering cloud engineering work in partnership with SRE, including deployments, scaling, reliability improvements, and incident readiness
- Hands-on CI/CD experience including automated quality gates, deployment safety practices, and release orchestration
- Strong observability mindset using tools such as Grafana and OpenSearch for dashboards, alerts, and troubleshooting
- Ability to drive cost optimization and efficiency through right-sizing, scaling strategy, and reducing operational toil
Leadership & Collaboration
- Strong cross-functional leadership with Product Owners, QA, UAT, Design, DW, Salesforce, SRE, and dependent engineering teams
- Ability to represent a distributed engineering team, surface risks early, and remove blockers
About Electronic Arts
We’re proud to have an extensive portfolio of games and experiences, locations around the world, and opportunities across EA. We value adaptability, resilience, creativity, and curiosity. From leadership that brings out your potential, to creating space for learning and experimenting, we empower you to do great work and pursue opportunities for growth.
We adopt a holistic approach to our benefits programs, emphasizing physical, emotional, financial, career, and community wellness to support a balanced life. Our packages are tailored to meet local needs and may include healthcare coverage, mental well-being support, retirement savings, paid time off, family leaves, complimentary games, and more. We nurture environments where our teams can always bring their best to what they do.
Electronic Arts is an equal opportunity employer. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, genetic information, religion, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, marital status, family status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We will also consider employment qualified applicants with criminal records in accordance with applicable law. EA also makes workplace accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities as required by applicable law.
