Internship Game Tools Programmer Jobs in California

This is a hybrid/ onsite position. 

For nearly 40 years, Naughty Dog has been crafting best-selling, critically acclaimed games that constantly push the boundaries of narrative, gameplay, and technology. Naughty Dog recently released The Last of Us Part II Remastered as well as a current generation remake of The Last of Us Part I for the PS5. We're also proud to say that The Last of Us Part I and Part II are now available for the first time on PC. Currently, we're busy at the kennel working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and we'd love to find talented individuals to join us. 

Naughty Dog games have long been lauded for their evocative, character-driven stories and attention to detail. We are committed to innovation within our games and as such have curated some of the top creative and technically innovative minds in the industry. We welcome a diverse pool of candidates and believe that a broad range of cultural and life experiences contribute to the overall well-being and success of the studio and the titles we craft together. 

At Naughty Dog, the growing web tools infrastructure has greatly enhanced developers' workflows over the years and is only accelerating. We see great potential in this expansion for services like asset management, our build pipeline, and large-scale game data. As a Web Tools Programmer, you will have total project ownership, including the development and deployment of the entire technology stack. From integrating with our game's runtime codebase, architecting a backend infrastructure, and developing functional user interfaces, our game development team will rely on you to innovate and improve our engine's toolset. 

What you will do: 

• Design, develop, and maintain fullstack web applications and integrations that enhance development workflows and connect with core studio tools and services 

• Extend and customize Atlassian applications (Jira, Confluence) through plugins, REST APIs, and automation frameworks to meet studiospecific needs 

• Work across distributed systems, investigating issues, optimizing performance, and ensuring reliability of our internal tools ecosystem 

• Design and maintain databases (relational, document, and cache stores) that support internal tools and analytics 

• Collaborate with multiple departments to translate their workflows into maintainable, scalable, and systemic solutions 

• Manage and prioritize multiple projects and their respective tasks independently while contributing to long-term architectural planning 

• Share knowledge with teammates in tool development, infrastructure best practices, and debugging complex integrations 

• Additional responsibilities may be assigned as needed or desired 

What Skills you will use: 

• Minimum of 3 years working in the video game industry 

• Managing Jira administration, workflows, permissions, and automation 

• Experience writing plugins, extensions, and integrations for Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence 

• Ability to prototype and quickly iterate on front-end web tools leveraging modern web frameworks like Vue and Tailwind 

• Advanced proficiency with serverside development across various interpreted languages (JavaScript/Typescript, Python, or PHP) and practical knowledge of REST API design 

• Solid understanding of distributed systems, including performance optimization, fault tolerance, and observability 

• Experience administering, optimizing, and migrating databases (MySQL, MongoDB, Redis) and understanding when it makes sense to use one over another 

• Familiarity managing and developing both cloud and on-prem infrastructures leveraging containerization, infrastructure as code (Terraform/Ansible), and observability tools 

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills necessary for working across our various departments and disciplines to improve their quality of life 

Bonus Skills: 

• Previous experience as a JIRA administrator 

• Experience reading and writing applications written in compiled languages such as C++ 

As part of the Naughty Dog application process, candidates should expect to be given a technical interview. 

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