Rare is an Xbox Game Studio creating the kind of games the world doesn’t have. Our values – explorers, evolving, together – are fundamental to the games we make and how we make them. Rare offers rewarding and fulfilling careers for exceptional people, supporting you to learn and grow. Our studio is a welcoming campus in the heart of the Midlands, where the majority of our team work in a flexible hybrid work pattern. We strive to make Rare an amazing place to work, embracing a culture of respect and building a supportive environment for our developers. Studio benefits are catered to making life easier for staff, including flexible working, a bonus scheme, an industry-leading pension package, private healthcare, mental health initiatives, and free events for employees and their families. By joining Rare, you'll be joining one of the finest studios in the industry with support from the wider Xbox Game Studios network. We're always on the lookout for exceptional people who can bring their expertise and unique thinking to help make our team even stronger At this exciting time in the studio's history, we are seeking a talented Lead Services Engineer with a diverse range of engineering and people-management skills to help us provide a rock-solid environment within which our games can run. We're big believers in high-quality engineering here at Rare and aim for fast iteration with robust methods. This means that we embrace modern development practices such as continuous delivery, automated testing, code reviews, pair programming and agile methods. We develop all our new services with .NET and use highly scalable databases such as Azure Cosmos DB. We're looking for someone who is eager to learn and grow with us, and who will actively contribute to the improvement of both team and engineering practices at Rare. Live Services is a central team that works across the breadth of Rare. We are responsible for the development and operations of Rare's services that support our games. We work end-to-end on each game, from designing scalable systems through to supporting their reliability in production. As a Lead within the Live Services team, you will work alongside other Leads and be responsible for your team delivering high-quality, tested services to support Rare's current and future games. You will also define and drive a vision for our cross-title services platform. Rare is a first-party Xbox studio serving millions of players every month, our services are a key part of the live functioning of these games and at the cutting edge of the Azure technology stack. At Rare, we give our engineers agency to solve problems creatively and in their own way, while minimising technical debt and avoiding maintenance hazards. Be part of Rare's culture. Be inquisitive, try things out and help those around you become even better. Required Skills and Experience Significant experience leading engineering teams. Significant experience in C# running large-scale cloud systems, ideally in Azure. Familiarity with automated build, test, and deployment pipelines. Writing tests and testable code is a key element to our approach, so experience here is essential. Desirable Skills and Experience Our team gets excited about code – if you’ve contributed to OSS, developed your own apps, services, games or anything else, we’d love to see examples As part of our team, you would work on modern release pipelines, so experience (or awareness) in CI/CD (Octopus Deploy/Azure DevOps/TeamCity) would be useful. For more on Rare's culture and achievements, see the About section on our website section. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form. Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.