Exciting times ahead!

During my break I haven’t been paying attention to my usual places where I check up information. One of those places is Maxis Careers, where we were able to spot many interesting details behind the scenes of The Sims 4 development. Oh, and also the development of the Next Generation Sims Game!

After my break I opened up the Maxis Careers Website and PLENTY of new Job Opportunities have been posted. Like, a lot.

The new Job Opportunities are new and are related to upcoming developments. Developments of both The Sims 4 and The Sims 5 (we call it like that until we know the official name).

It’s an exciting time for The Sims Franchise. We don’t even have to explain too much – it’s literally all written out in the Job Descriptions down below that we found on Maxis Careers! These are the most interesting ones we found (out of so many other Job Listings!).

Web Designer (Contract) – Maxis

Maxis is looking for a Web Designer to support our efforts at reimagining our internal website / information hub. This person will work with multiple teams across the Maxis studio to understand, design, plan, track, and implement our internal website / information hub projects. A typical day will include conversations with project or business leaders, documentation and creative assets gathering, website architecture/content page framework building, and maintaining timeline and deliverables to ensure on time project completion. 

This person will report to the Director of Business Operations, Maxis.

Responsibilities:

• You will produce visual elements (concepts, mocks, sample pages & prototypes) consistent with studio brand and voice
• You will design the structure and implement an internal website/information hub for Maxis
• You will maintain regular communications within project partners and stakeholders
• You will maintain and report on roadmap status across the project(s)
• You will anticipate and escalate communications regarding risks, problems and roadblocks
• You will facilitate regular checkpoints with partners to maintain alignment and balanced solutions that adhere to users and business goals

Core Game Engineer – Maxis

High-level

Reporting to a Development Director a Core Engineer will work on one or multiple related game subsystems within the game. The work will range from rapid prototyping to production development. Most of the work will be done in Unreal Engine, both in C++ and Blueprints. Some prototypes and features may be done completely in C++.

Role Requirements

Please note that you do not need to qualify for all requirements to be considered. We encourage you to apply if you can meet most of the requirements and are comfortable opening a dialog to be considered.

• 3+ years experience implementing complex game subsystems.
• 3+ years of programming experience in modern C++
• Desktop (PC/Mac) development experience required.
• Experience with Unreal Engine is strongly suggested.
• Experience with mobile platforms suggested.
• Skills debugging complex applications.
• Experience prototyping systems.
• Experience protoptyping applications.

Character Artist (Contract) – Maxis

As a Character Artist with Maxis, you will be working closely with the Art Director and Technical Leads to define visual standards and technical specifications of characters for the project. In addition to creating high quality character models and materials, the Character Artist assists peers and external partners to deliver work that meets the project standards. The ideal candidate proactively seeks opportunities to elevate the game, embraces constructive feedback, and thrives in a highly collaborative environment.

Responsibilities:

• You will work with the Art Director and technical partners to define and refine the look and feel of characters for the project.
• You will work with Technical Art, Engineering and other artists to develop the character creation and integration pipeline.
• You will create high quality character models and materials/shaders including in-game and high-resolution assets.
• You will update style and technical documents for the character art team.
• You will collaborate with Technical Artists to create and improve tools and workflows.
• You will actively participate in milestone planning and reviews.

Game Designer I and II – The Sims 4 (Contract)

As a Designer on The Sims, you’ll work with a team of enthusiastic industry craftspeople from all walks of life. You will use your passion and knowledge to design player-first experiences that surprise, delight, and invite millions of Simmers around the world to Play with Life.

You will report into a studio Development Director.

Responsibilities

• Be an advocate, represent the Design team.
• Be an active member of the development team using inclusive collaborative frameworks with diverse teams to decide on goals and establish the stories players want to tell within a given release
• Collect and organize feedback from brainstorming workshops to inform design goals, visions, and solutions, and provide feedback to other designers.
• Design, tune and bug fix entire systems within Maxis’ proprietary tools
• Help establish best practices for the team.
• Become a mentor to more junior members of the team.
• Have a depth of knowledge across a majority of systems, being able to oversee entire pillars for a pack and train/support the team on its features.
• Determine gameplay experience goals for designs, and tune features to meet those goals.
• Improve designs based on playtests, game metrics, team input and community feedback.
• Be resourceful and solve problems using the tools and time/scope available to create unique and fun experiences for players.
• Collaborate with all team disciplines, including artists, animators, modelers, engineers and producers to get support from the team and guide a project from initial design to final production.
• Become an expert on the game and our community, drawing from our large, varied player base and our past games to make and defend intelligent design choices going forward.
• Have an eye for improving process and efficiency to make life easier for the Design team.
• Help establish best practices for the team.

Animator II – Maxis

As an Animator, you will create high quality key-frame animations and collaborate with other disciplines to design and implement interaction state-flows in-engine. You will be creating animations that express a wide range of emotions and personality. You have a strong understanding of the latest keyframe animation workflows.  You have extensive experience using Maya and implementing content in-engine. You will receive direction and feedback directly from Senior Animators and the Animation Director.

Responsibilities:

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• Work with Animation Lead and Director to create high-quality keyframe animation with heavy emphasis on full body character acting.
• Produce content under tight game development deadlines.
• With guidance from your Lead, collaborate with other essential contributors of the Production process to fulfill Design Goals. Essential contributions include:
• Work with different technical and art disciplines to solve implementation challenges.
• Estimate and provide scoping options for content.
• Design animation assets and state machines using our proprietary engine.
• Present implementation strategies alongside other contributors.
• Use both Maya and art tools to implement animated characters and objects in a proprietary engine.
• Use proprietary engine and pre-vis tools to technically verify animation content for self and others.
• Work with other essential disciplines to solve complex game bugs.
• Maintain and track animation assets related to your implementation designs.
• Create technical documentation of your implementations.
• Hold focused discussions concerning technical implementations you have contributed to, to spread knowledge across the animation team.

Development Director – The Sims

You will be responsible for managing a development team. This can range from artists, designers, software engineers, QA and other production staff. Development Directors are the keepers of the project schedule and play a vital role in successfully moving the development team from one project phase to the next while ensuring a strong focus on quality, collaboration and communication. You will partner closely with producers (our product owners) to ensure that they are managing the project on time, to quality, and within budget

Leadership:

• Builds and evolves an effective team; identifies resourcing needs, provides challenges and developmental opportunities to ensure that all employees reach their potential.
• Builds and maintains effective working relationships with the immediate team and those outside of the immediate team that have an effect on the successful completion of the project.
• Provides line management to employees across disciplines within a single project team.
• Maintains regular communication with the project team and coordinates dependencies with external partners.

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with project stakeholders to establish and assign tasks from defined project goals.
• Partner with production to manage scope and quality.
• Determine the resource requirements to meet the tasks and/or project requirements
• Proactively assesses and mitigates risk for the team’s assigned scope.
• Tracks progress of team’s deliverables and provides regular status reporting and capacity plan updates.
• Actively partners with product owners, tech and craft leads to resolve problems that surfaces for the team.
• Run stand ups and sprint planning meetings effectively
• Work with subject matter experts of your team and ensure all workflow is clearly defined, processes are documented, and staff trained in expectations on the workflow.
• Manages career development of direct reports, including development of individual development plans, and conducting regular one-on-ones.

Creative Qualities:

• Prioritizing and resolving issues through creative problem solving skills.
• Recognizing and balancing priorities of eliminating the root causes of problems.

Data Project Manager (contract) – Maxis

As a Data Project Manager at Maxis, you’ll report to the Lead Product Manager and work with a team of enthusiastic industry craftspeople from all walks of life. You will use your passion and knowledge to be the champion of telemetry within Maxis so that the team can use our data to guide development of player-first experiences that surprise, delight, and invite millions of Simmers around the world to Play with Life.

Responsibilities:

• You will champion data informed game development. You will be the primary steward of telemetry within the game team by tracking data hook requests and ensuring implementation of those requests.
• You will highlight and celebrate new dashboards and other data insights that aid the development process
• You will work with multiple development partners to improve on the studio’s data infrastructure and identify dependencies between discipline groups
• You will be the driving force that solves breakdowns in the data and telemetry process and create solutions for the future
• You will identify when game telemetry is not operating correctly and bring together the teams needed to solve the issue
• You will write detailed documentation for telemetry and data requested by product managers and other game stakeholders to ensure its posterity. 

Character Artist – Maxis

We are looking for a Character Artist to work closely with the Art Director, Concept team, Senior Character Artist, and Technical Leads to define visual standards and support the technical development of characters for the project. You will actively participate in the research and development of the asset creation methods and pipelines designed to add new design-driven features unique to the project. In addition to creating high-quality character models and materials, you will guide external partners to deliver work that meets the project standards. The ideal candidate proactively seeks opportunities to elevate the game, enjoys learning emerging technologies that improve the pipeline, embraces constructive feedback, and thrives in a highly collaborative environment. You will report to a Development Director of the Creative team.

Responsibilities:

• Create visually appealing character assets with the Art Director, Concept and Character teams
• Create both high resolution and low polygon 3D sculpts along with texturing game assets
• Solve for aesthetic and technical challenges with the Character and Technical Art teams
• Participate in critiquing your work and the work of other artists

Senior Rendering Engineer – The Sims!

The Sims team at Maxis is looking for a Senior Software Engineer with experience in performance optimization, specializing in rendering and graphics. You will report to the Development Manager for the Performance and Scaling team, aligning to product goals set by the Technical Director. Your primary goal is to modernize The Sime graphics engine to improve performance and improve visual quality on newer hardware, including Windows, macOS, and consoles.

Responsibilities:

• Work with all partners to integrate their systems and tools into The Sims game engine, development environment, and workflow
• Collaborate with game team technical directors and engineers to implement game features on Windows, macOS, and consoles
• Improve game rendering performance by taking advantage of platform specific capabilities
• Partner with build and release team to build, release, and deploy game on all supported platforms
• Establish and drive low-level performance profiling and optimization projects on multiple platforms

Gameplay Systems Engineer – The Sims!

The Sims team at Maxis is looking for a Senior Software Engineer with experience in performance optimization, specializing in rendering and graphics. You will report to the Development Manager for the Performance and Scaling team, aligning to product goals set by the Technical Director. Your primary goal is to improve the runtime performance of The Sims game simulator to achieve responsive player experience across supported platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Improve game simulation performance by increasing the efficiency of the existing solutions, introducing more efficient solutions and technologies, or taking advantage of platform-specific capabilities when possible
• Maintain and enhance gameplay simulation systems inspection and profiling tools
• Define and drive gameplay system performance and memory

What do you think? Let us know in the Discussion below!