Technical Director, Live Games

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

About Big Viking Games 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.

About The Role 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.

What You'll Do Own the Architecture

Own the technical direction across our live games and shared platform services

Work with technical leads and senior engineers to plan, evaluate, and execute architectural changes

Make or drive alignment on technical decisions that are expensive to reverse

Lead significant changes to systems that cannot simply be taken offline, including migrations, protocol changes, schema changes, staged rollouts, and live production improvements

Balance modernization against stability. Much of the codebase is mature, valuable, and revenue-generating. The job is improving it without breaking what players rely on

Hold technical quality and consistency across multiple concurrent projects and shared services

Ensure architectural decisions are documented, understood, and executable by the team

Build and Modernize

Ship code across the stack, including TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML5, Java, PHP, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Docker, ArgoCD, and AWS

Work on browser-based client systems, custom rendering technology, asset loading, performance, backend services, real-time game systems, and platform integrations

Solve complex technical problems in mature, high-value live systems

Refactor and extend legacy systems carefully, with a clear understanding of production risk

Improve the engineering pipeline, including build, test, deploy, local development, tooling, automation, and developer experience

Help make the codebase more maintainable, observable, testable, and easier for both humans and agents to work with

Identify high-leverage technical improvements that reduce risk, increase velocity, and improve long-term system health

Lead Agentic Engineering Adoption

Push agentic tooling into how we build, test, review, and maintain software

Build or guide AI-enabled workflows that take action in engineering systems, not just suggest code