Job listings can reveal a good bit about companies’ upcoming projects that they would otherwise have kept in the dark, or tweaks to existing company projects. A new job listing from Niantic fits that mold, and Pokemon GO players who have been frustrated or even outright fed up with server issues can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Niantic is currently hiring for a number of positions, including a Pokemon GO community manager, but the first position you see when you hit their jobs webpage is a “Software Engineer – Server Infrastructure” role.
The position demands somebody with either two years of relevant experience, two relevant internships at large companies, or a PhD. The job listing says that applicants should expect to work with “real-time indexing, querying and aggregation problems at massive scales of hundreds of millions of events per day”. That gives a bit of an idea of just the sort of scale that Pokemon GO is running at, and paints a pretty clear picture of why CEO John Hanke said at the San Diego Comic Con that he wouldn’t be adding any new features to the game until the server issues were sorted out. The position also favors applicants who have some experience with Google Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services, which may imply that at least a bit of the program is run behind the scenes via Amazon’s infrastructure, or that Niantic is using a custom infrastructure that’s similar to those servers. The ideal candidate will have a good amount of skill with Java, cloud computing, and NoSQL. Whoever fills this position will likely be well aware of Pokemon GO’s server issues, and know exactly what they’re going into, hopefully with some idea of how to help fix it.
Niantic is also looking for a global community manager for Pokemon GO. This person should be an expert on all things Pokemon in general, and Pokemon GO in particular. They’ll be charged with managing the community at large, along with moderating online communities related to the game and generating content updates for the game’s main social channels, like YouTube. This person will also engage personally with fans and create social media campaigns for the game community. Most pressing of all, they’ll be responsible for reporting key metrics to shareholders.