Engineering Manager

Description

Fenris Creations is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the infrastructure engineering team behind EVE Online.

EVE runs as a single shared universe, where every player has an opportunity to leave a mark on a 20-year running persistent game experience. Our game cluster spans our own datacenter hardware and AWS. Our tight-knit team owns this infrastructure end-to-end: servers and network gear in the racks, the cloud networks and Golang domain specific services in AWS, and the incident, change management, testing, alerting, automation, and budget processes that keep it all running.

You'll lead the engineers who build and run that platform. You'll set technical direction, own reliability and cost, and stay close enough to the work to make good calls during an outage or a hardware refresh. This is a hands-on management role.

The role is based in Reykjavík, Iceland. We are a hybrid office, and offer flexibility around which days are in-office and which can be worked remotely.

Your Tasks

• Hire, coach, and grow infrastructure engineers. Run 1:1s, give performance feedback, and guide career growth.
• Set the team's priorities across new platform work, requests from game teams, operational load, and technical debt.
• Run planning with product owners and other engineering leads.
• Run the incident management process: on-call rotations and expectations, escalation paths, alerting, and blameless postmortems.
• Guide production change management, setting policy on deployment reviews, maintenance windows, and rollback plans, and so on.
• Define and track SLIs and SLOs for core services and set team priorities in response.
• Guide architecture for our on-premise datacenter and AWS environments, and how traffic moves between them.
• Oversee hardware lifecycle: procurement, bare-metal provisioning, firmware and OS updates, and decommissioning.
• Own network design and security across both environments, from Cisco routers and firewalls to VPCs, Transit Gateways, and access controls.
• Push for automation wherever possible, in provisioning, configuration, CI/CD, and observability, to minimize engineering TOIL.
• Set the cloud and on-premise infrastructure budgets, and forecast spend as the game grows.
• Manage vendor relationships and contracts with cloud, datacenter, CDN, and tooling providers.
• Find and deliver cost savings without trading away reliability.

Your Profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years in infrastructure, systems, site reliability, or distributed systems engineering.
• 2+ years managing engineers directly, including hiring and performance management.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems — message queues, service discovery, consistency, failure modes, and how to debug them in production.
• Hands-on experience running physical hardware in a datacenter — bare-metal provisioning, server and storage lifecycle, and working with colocation providers.
• Deep cloud provider experience, especially in networking and security (VPCs, Transit Gateways, routing, security groups) and running services at scale.
• Solid networking fundamentals — TCP/IP, routing protocols such as BGP, VLANs, firewalls, and router configuration.
• Experience leading incident response and building on-call and postmortem practices.
• Comfort reading and reviewing code in Golang or Python.
• Experience owning or forecasting an infrastructure budget.
• Strong technical writing and spoken communication skills in English — design docs, tradeoff analyses — and a track record of driving complex, cross-functional technical projects across multiple project and executive stakeholders.
• Experience with RabbitMQ, NATS, or other message brokers in production.
• Experience with DynamoDB and Redis.
• Automation with Python and Ansible.
• Bare-metal provisioning with PXE boot, Tinkerbell, or similar tools.
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD with TeamCity or GitHub Actions.
• Observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Honeycomb.
• Background in game services or other low-latency, high-concurrency systems.
• Experience with hybrid on-premise and cloud environments, or migrations between them.

Our cloud platform is a set of Golang microservices in AWS, built around a service gateway and RabbitMQ message queues. On-premise, we run our own servers and Cisco network gear in the datacenter, managed with Ansible and Python.

What We Can Offer You

• The chance to work on EVE Online with talented, ambitious colleagues.
• A multicultural workplace that encourages growth and new ideas.
• Dual-monitor workstation and a flexible work environment.
• An active fun division that hosts regular events.
• A canteen with weekly breakfast and lunch menus, plus drinks and snacks.
• Discretionary quarterly and annual performance sharing plan.
• Annual sports grant.
• Mobile phone and mobile plan.
• Home internet.
• Conditional monthly transportation grant.
• Free on-site doctor and other on-site services at a discount.
• Relocation package.