Spotlight - John Northan, Studio Line Director

Introduce yourself and your role at Ripple Effect.

I am John Northan, Studio Line Director for the Engineering team. I have an extensive background in game development, having worked as a Gameplay Engineer, Lead Engineer, and Studio Technical Director. I’m probably best known for being a lead engineer on Pandemic’s Star Wars Battlefront series, one that seems to have influenced so many gamers.

What does a line manager do at Ripple Effect?

The line manager role is a really exciting, relatively new role within the games industry. In most games industry management and leadership roles, there is a need to focus on both product and people. Given how important our game products are, this typically means that we spend almost all of our time fire-fighting and managing devs on product related issues, with barely any time providing quality feedback and support to our devs. 

The line manager role focuses almost exclusively on our people. We get to focus on growing our developers, helping them to become high-performers and to grow in their careers. We have the time to provide coaching and mentoring, consistently throughout the year. We have time to bring training opportunities to our craft teams, for example our engineering team has covered training courses on game dev math, modern C++, and live service tools. We also have time to drive studio initiatives to help grow our studio culture.

Based on your experience, what makes Ripple Effect a great place to work? 

Like all game studios, we want to build the best games. Where I think we’re different is that we also want to develop the best studio, one where our developers thrive in their crafts, growing every year through deliberate learning and training. An example of how we’re different is that every year we host two “Inspire Weeks” for the whole studio, where we pause all game development and give our devs an opportunity to refresh and learn new skills, form relationships with devs they don’t usually work with, and achieve goals that they create to advance their careers.

Can you tell us about some of the exciting engineering roles that are available?

We are looking for all skill levels and all disciplines, including systems software engineers and gameplay software engineers. We develop some of the most challenging game systems in the games industry, building high-performance multiplayer systems that support emergent sandbox gameplay.

We are also looking to hire a Studio Technical Director. This role offers an opportunity to work with studios across EA, learning about their technology, and developing strategic partnerships. The ideal candidate would have experience working across several teams and studios. It’s also an opportunity to grow our existing engineering team, providing coaching to upcoming technical directors.

Interested in working at Ripple Effect? Head to our Careers page to browse our open roles!