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Large Gaming Holding CTO Interview
A game holding with many studios and genres is not only content, but also a platform: engines, live operations, network, data stack, DevEx and security. We talked to the CTO (generalized interview) about what decisions really drive metrics, how to stay fast with growth, and why "technology without culture" doesn't take off.
1) Strategy: what makes technology a competitive advantage
Question: Your priorities for 2-3 years?
CTO: Three axes:1. Delivery platform (build → test → release → telemetry) with time from commit to production <2 hours for live feature.
2. Reliability of live services: SLO of critical paths (login, matchmaking, payments, inventory) and "graceful degradation."
3. Data and AI: online scoring (selection of missions/matches), offline predictives (churn/LTV/toxicity), and strict guardrails.
2) Architecture: monolith, microservices or "modular monolith"?
Question: What style do you think is reasonable for game services?
CTO: Modular core monolith (account, inventory, housekeeper) + microservices on the periphery (matchmaking, analytics, payment adapters, notifications). This reduces network "crosses," simplifies transactions and allows teams to independently develop "edge" functions. On top are ficheflags and canary rolls.
3) Network code and matchmaking
Question: How to keep a low delay and fair play?
CTO:- Protocols: UDP/QUIC for real-time, gRPC/HTTP for metadata.
- Client-side prediction + server reconciliation against "teleportation."
- Sharding by region/rank, prioritizing RTT stability over "perfect" balance.
- Matchmaking: Elo/TrueSkill hybrid + expected delay + role/position.
- Edge-relay nodes for NAT, anti-DDoS and encryption.
- Anti-cheat: client integrity signals, behavioral models, server validation.
4) Live operations platform
Q: What's under your bonnet live-ops?
CTO:- Event/season calendar, missions, storefronts and stores - managed from orchestrator with previews and A/B.
- Economy service with award budgets and anti-inflation caps.
- "Warm" migrations of schemes and hot-reload game rules.
- Experimental platform: phicheflags, bandits, geo/role-split, statistical power and guardrails (SLO, toxicity, payments).
5) Data stack and ML/AI
Q: How does the data work?
CTO:- Event flow (OpenTelemetry) → streaming to lake/warehouse, fichestor for on-line scoring.
- Real-time display cases (≤1 -5 min) for products and support.
- ML: churn/uplift/LTV, dynamic complexity (DDA), chat toxicity, anti-fraud payments, mission/content recommendations.
- Generative: localization, assists to producers and QA; strict licenses and watermarks, RAG bots for knowledge.
- MLOps: tracking experiments, feature/target drift, canary deploy models, explainability (SHAP).
6) Reliability and SRE
Question: How do you measure the health of services?
CTO:- SLO on the path "client → match → result → inventory → payment"; errors as budget.
- Distributed tracing to find regressions.
- "Graceful degradation": turn off "expensive" features (repetitions, cosmetics) at peaks; auto-tic reduction where possible.
- GameDays and chaos tests, incident training.
- Reserves: multi-zone, read-only inventory mode, queues for non-system operations.
7) Security, privacy, anti-cheat
Q: Where are the main risks?
CTO:- Keys only through KMS/HSM, secrets - with rotation.
- RBAC/ABAC and admin access log, signature of build artifacts.
- Anti-cheat: client integrity (checksums, memory distrust), server arbitrage of the result, behavioral "vector signals."
- Privacy: PII minimization, policy data retention, right to explanation for automatic measures.
- Compliance: GDPR/local, incident reporting and DPIA.
8) FinOps and efficacy
Question: How do you reduce the cost of a platform without harm?
CTO:- Auto-scaling by SLO, not by coarse CPUs.
- Cold regions for rare content, "nearline" for telemetry.
- Claims GPU pools, network cost profiling.
- Cost-to-serve per DAU/mast metric; release benchmarks.
- "Architecture with a budget": any feature goes to a review on the increase in latency and cost.
9) DevEx: speed of teams
Q: How do I make developers quick and calm?
CTO:- Service templates, single bootstrap, golden paths.
- Monorepo for the core, polyrepo at the periphery; API/SDK codogeneration.
- Integration environments "like prod" (twin data).
- CI/CD with build caches, platform test matrices, playtest bots.
- Data to developers - through synthetic sets and obfuscation.
10) Culture and org model
Q: How do you connect the platform and the studios?
CTO: Platform teams (identification, economics, inventory, matchmaking, telemetry, ML, DevEx). Above them is the technical council (architecture, security, data). Studios are autonomous in content, but use "golden paths." Each quarter is a roadmap review with common KPIs.
11) Subscriptions, payments and protecting the economy
Question: What is important at the checkout and store?
CTO:- Smart payment routing, transparent ETA/commissions, stable wires where possible.
- Antifraud: device + behavior + graph of connections (account-device-payment).
- The economics of awards are with "caps," without P2W angles, dynamic value through seasons.
- Built-in RG patterns (pauses, limits, reality checks).
12) Content delivery and engines
Question: Unity/Unreal/own engine - how to choose?
CTO: We use a hybrid: a commercial engine for fast Time-to-Fun; native modules for network code, economics, and telemetry. Common platform SDK: inventory, missions, store, analytics, anti-cheat, payments - so that studios do not reinvent the wheel.
13) Metrics that decide
Gaming: D1/D7/D30, stickiness (DAU/MAU), median session length, "time to core-fun."
Business: payer conversion, ARPPU, LTV/CAC, ROI events.
Reliability: uptime, p50/p95/p99 on critical paths, match time.
Quality of releases: change failure rate, lead time, MTTR.
Safety: MTTD/MTTR, proportion containment, "health" secrets.
Cost-to-serve: $/DAU, $/match, $/gigabyte telemetry.
14) Typical bugs and anti-patterns
Microservices "for the sake of fashion" → network storms and complex transactions.
Telemetry after release, not before - blind spots on incidents.
Experiments without guardrails - "success" at the cost of burning out SLO.
Anti-cheat only on the client - zero trust in the client is mandatory.
Gene-AI without licenses and controls - legal and brand risks.
No "graceful degradation" - cascading falls at peaks.
15) 180-day roadmap (for growth holding)
Days 1-30 - Diagnosis and SLO
Critical path directory, SLO/SLA, end-to-end tracing.
Gap analysis DevEx/CI/CD, inventory of secrets.
Days 31-60 - Platform features and experiments
Ficheflags, canary releases, A/B infrastructure with guardrails.
Single SDK: account, inventory, economy, telemetry.
Days 61-90 - Data and ML
Fichestor, real-time showcases, basic churn/uplift models.
Privacy and explainability policies, RAG bot of knowledge.
Days 91-120 - Reliability and Safety
GameDays/chaos, "graceful degradation," runbooks NOC.
KMS/rotation, build signature, anti-cheat server layer.
Days 121-180 - FinOps and scale
Cost-to-serve metrics, auto-scale by SLO, GPU pools.
Live-ops content calendar, DDA, localization showcases.
16) Checklists
SRE/Reliability
- SLO for login/match/inventory/payment, error budgets.
- Tracing + logs + metrics in a single system.
- Graceful degradation and red button feature.
- Runbooks, pager duty, GameDays.
Safety/Antichitis
- KMS/HSM, secret rotation, artifact signature.
- RBAC/ABAC Admin Access Log.
- Server-based game validation, behavioral models.
- DPIA/GDPR, PII minimization, incident reporting.
Data/ML
- Event streaming, fichestor, real-time storefronts.
- churn/uplift/DDA models, drift monitoring.
- Explainability, dataset auditing, content licenses.
- Experimental discipline and guardrails.
DevEx / CI-CD
- Service templates, golden paths.
- Cached builds, test matrices, auto releases.
- Synthetic data, obfuscation.
- Preview environments, playtest bots.
Economy/Ticket Office
- Payment Orchestrator, ETA/Fees in UI.
- Antifraud: device + link graph.
- Caps of awards, lack of P2W angles.
- RG patterns: limits, pauses, reality checks.
Technological leadership in games is a stable delivery rhythm and reliable live services, supported by data and responsible design. The right architecture (modular core + peripheral services), strong DevEx, measured by SLO, meaningful AI and strict security turn a complex holding into a managed growth machine, where studios quickly make content, and the platform carefully and predictably brings it to millions of players.