Open clouds vs the big three

Yes, the major public clouds offer a lot. But what you may not know are the limitations, and how open clouds make the difference.

Are you on the hunt for a new and exciting role? We’ve noticed a huge increase in the amount of jobs being posted to our job board lately (which makes a lot of sense considering that the world is slowly returning to normal). Anyway, we wanted to share some of these jobs with you, in the hopes that your dream gig might just be a couple of clicks away.

Manufacturing Engineer (ME), Zwift

You will be engaged in the design and development of new products, manufacturing methods, processes, tooling, and jigs for Zwift. The candidate will work with a global cross-functional team to meet aggressive performance, cost, and schedule goals for a wide variety of products.

This opportunity is for you if you are passionate about creating new products and you find it exciting to develop new production methods. You are the go-to person for manufacturing problem-solving and you thrive in mission critical challenging situations where failure is never an option. Your design thinking is a blend of Engineering, Quality, and Operations; you are an Excel power user able to quickly model and accurately construct tools with minimal inputs, you can design mechanical systems and components and are comfortable soliciting feedback throughout the process.

Data Architect, FanDuel

In this position, you will perform design work for large and complex data solutions and the interfaces between them. Position will drive adherence to standards, processes, and policies and create architecture documentation for the entire data engineering team, working effectively across various data verticals.

This position will also lead and centralize the company’s efforts to drive Operational Excellence. This includes owning the roadmap for quality operation and OE items with a timeline and progress tracking across the entire data engineering org.

FanDuel is looking for someone with strong database knowledge in data warehouse concepts like ETL pipeline, modeling, maintenance, configuration, programming, troubleshooting, debugging, query optimization, and testing. The ideal candidate will also have strong skills in solving complex data challenges and presenting with a short and long-term solution that can be followed.

Senior Android Engineer, Udemy

As an Android developer at Udemy, you’ll be responsible for building native apps for students and instructors that will be used in every country on earth. Towards this goal, you will work in close collaboration with product owners, designers, user researchers, and other development teams at Udemy. The most important goal is improving lives through learning, whether it’s mastering a computer language or learning power chords on a guitar.

The role will involve developing, testing, documenting, and releasing full-stack, end-to-end features for Udemy’s Android application that supports over 40 million students worldwide and more than 130,000 courses. The ideal candidate will have 3+ years of professional software development experience, working primarily on Android in Kotlin. They will have good knowledge of object-oriented design and computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms).

IAM Security Architect / Engineer, Avanade

Avande is looking for an experienced IAM Security Engineer to join their growing team.

The ideal candidate recognizes cyber security as the management of cyber risk associated with people, process, technology, and data. You understand the risks businesses face and how to use the Microsoft Ecosystem to design “Zero Trust – Identity and Data Centric” solutions that will mitigate these risks and ensure compliance. You’re an astute advisor on Security Transformation, Security Strategy, and Security Operations (SOC). As a Cyber Security Manager, you can effectively lead technical and non-technical teams.

You’re passionate about understanding or discovering security vulnerabilities and aspire to be the “Trusted Advisor.” You know all about identifying, providing, and validating security requirements of IT solutions, and you’ve done this in a consulting environment. You’re a skilled communicator who can effectively articulate cyber security risks to technical and non-technical audiences.

Offensive Security Engineer, Klaviyo

This position will require you to use your technical expertise to study the Klaviyo cyber footprint, find potential risk, verify risks, and work with engineering teams to remediate those risks. You will respond to security alerts, triage, and build automations around response.

The ideal candidate will be an offensive cyber security professional first, the desire to break applications and gain access to restricted data and computing resources is a driving force for all things you do. You will also have a sense of responsibility to protect the company by working with security alerts and working on security tickets as an analyst. You will have a proven track record of compromising AWS resources, an understanding of AWS technologies used to secure environments and weaknesses these technologies introduce to an environment.

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Lual Mayen is a former refugee who left Africa to become a game developer in the U.S. He has received recognition from The Game Awards and CNN for his mission to make games about peace, and he was a fitting speaker to close our event today.

At the end of GamesBeat and Facebook’s Driving Game Growth event, Facebook game partnerships head Leo Olebe, Mayen, and I spoke about how to get inspiration in the game industry today. The session, “You Can’t Be What You Can’t See,” comes from quote from Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and a civil rights activist who felt that children needed to see role models that inspired them.

Mayen’s story

Mayen spent the first 22 years of his life as a refugee. His family fled from South Sudan in the country’s civil war and wound up at a refugee camp in Uganda, which happens to be where Olebe’s family is from. Mayen was one of more than 2.5 million displaced by the civil war, which began in 1983. In the refugee camp, Mayen’s mother saved up money for three years to buy a laptop for him, and he used it, among other things, to learn how to play games.

Mayen saw a laptop computer at a registration station for the refugee camp. He told his mother he wanted one. She saved money for three years to get the $300 to buy it for him. When she gave it to him in 2013, he burst into tears. He took it to an internet cafe and used it. And he discovered Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and the joy of playing. He didn’t know how video games were made.

It was a three-hour walk to get to the internet cafe, but he made the journey regularly just to charge his computer and play games. As a child born in a violent war, Mayen thought about how to create a game that could inspire peace. He taught himself to make games and formed his own company, Junub Games. He created a game called Salaam (an Arabic word that means peace) about protecting communities from being destroyed. It was a 10-megabit mobile game, but he could only distribute it via Bluetooth networking.

That put him on the road to become internationally known. The game spread in a viral way. A conference organizer at A Maze discovered it, tracked him down, and asked him to speak at a conference on games in South Africa.

There, Mayen met Rami Ismail, the cofounder of Vlambeer and an  successful game developer. As an ambassador for indies, Ismail encouraged Mayen to pursue his passion of making games. Mayen also made a board game, Wahda, that encourages peaceful conflict resolution. He did so because it did not require a computer to play, so refugees may have a chance to play it.

Ismail paid for certain panelists to come to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But despite an invitation, Mayen wasn’t able to go in 2017 because of President Donald Trump’s immigration restrictions. His visa wasn’t approved in time. But Mayen made it in 2018, and he gave a hell of an inspiring talk.

Later in 2018, Mayen appeared at The Game Awards, where he was named a Global Gaming Citizen in conjunction with an award sponsored by Facebook. (27 million people watched that show.) That event was where Olebe, who has been in the game industry for 20 years, met Mayen. In October, CNN named Mayen one of its “Champions for Change.”

More recently, Mayen started the Lual Mayen Foundation, to empower refugees with technology. And his team is working on making his game, Salaam, available on Facebook as an instant game. Olebe has been one of the people helping Mayen on his journey to publish a globally accessible game about peace.

“Meeting Leo was a great opportunity for me,” Mayen said. “When I was growing up in the refugee camp and then started doing this, I wondered how I can meet the right people who can keep pushing me. It’s a very hard industry. There is so much competition.”

Mayen needed to find people who could connect him with mentors and others who could help him tell his inspiring story through both words and games.

Finding inspiration

Above: Lual Mayen, maker of Salaam and Wahda, speaking at the GDC in 2019.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

In our session, Mayen and Olebe spoke about how to inspire game developers to be their best selves and put proven diversity practices into effect. Olebe said that every time he talks to a passionate developer, that’s what has given him strength, resolve, and resilience.

“We’re in an amazing industry, that’s filled with amazing people, who are ready to tell amazing stories,” Olebe said. “If we are listening, if we are doing the best job we can to listen, then inspiration can’t help but come through. Lual’s story is an incredible example of this.”

Growth itself is inspiring for developers. More than three billion people are connected around the world and most of them are gamers. More people are recognizing games are a great way to have fun during the pandemic.

“I think we’re just getting started,” Olebe said.

Mayen said his journey has prepared him for whatever can happen in life. During the pandemic, he said that he connected with the right people who could push him and who have done so much in their lives. He is using the lessons he has learned to create something for other people.

And Mayen said, “People are just beginning to understand the power and to be able to use the medium for something that is very important: changing the world. Having leaders like Leo is important because a lot of people want to do good but don’t know how to do it.”

How to make change

Asked how you change the industry for the better, Mayen said it is important to focus on diversity among game developers so they can tell their own stories because no one else can tell those stories.

Olebe said that people are under the impression that creating good in the world requires an extraordinary effort. It doesn’t take a ton of resources, he said. It simply requires talking to people, whether it’s at industry events or on Zoom calls.

“It’s as simple as giving people a chance to even talk to you,” he said.

Last month, Facebook Gaming committed $10 million over two years to support the Black gaming creator community. This is part of a company-wide commitment to support Black and diverse communities in the U.S.

“This stuff doesn’t have to be hard,” Olebe said. “Just do something. Anybody watching this panel has the ability to create positive change for somebody else.”

I asked Mayen why he is working hard to undertake charitable efforts at the beginning of his career. But he said he spent 22 years in a refugee camp, and that he didn’t start his company to make games and make a career. Rather, he did it for the community.

Asked how he can help people like Mayen, Olebe said, “Let great people do their thing. Lual spent 22 years in a refugee camp and now he has his own game studio and foundation. That’s all Lual. The best I can do is offer to make introductions and then get out of his way. Component No. 1 is not trying to prescribe what greatness looks like, not trying to make a specific mold.”

You should let people shine, Olebe said, and then tap into the resources that you have to help out.

“Everybody has the opportunity to tap into their network to lend that to others,” he said. “Let people be awesome. Give them the opportunity to be awesome. That’s what doesn’t happen. That is the issue in this space. There are people knocking on the door saying I have something cool to share with you. I have this great story to tell you. And the door remains closed. We need to open the door. That’s what the games industry needs to do.”

Olebe said he tries to open doors for people by meeting as many people as he can. He puts himself out there and, while it feels risky, and he said it returns “rewards greater than you can possibly happen.”

He added, “How many lives have we been able to change together, simply from the fact that we met?”

Asked how you open the door for yourself, Mayen said, “There is something available in you. Something you have to offer. Today, I’m not just going to wake up in the morning and say, ‘Hey Leo. I want this from you.’ You have to say, ‘hey, this is what I have. And this is what I have to offer to the community.'”