Chris Field

Senior Engineer @Rare Ltd

Twycross, GB

I initially joined Rare as a contractor to help build the website for Sea of Thieves To do this we utilized React/NodeJS for the front end, and.net (C#) for the services. The services integrate with several external systems such as Microsoft CRM, Azure PlayFab, and the Sea of Thieves game itself. Shortly after starting, I took on the responsibility for developing the public-facing customer support site, and the internal tools for the support agents to support the game with. Both of which were written using a similar same technology stack to the main website. The work itself was quite innovative, so as well as development, I also worked along-side other teams in other Microsoft Xbox Studios to help them build their own support platforms.I became a permanent employee of Microsoft (who own Rare) as a Senior Engineer in 2018, and was promoted to become Lead Engineer overseeing the Web and UI teams in March 2021. As well as identifying future opportunities for the teams, this also involves line management and mentoring of the engineers. I do prefer a more hands on development role though, and as the teams grew in size, and the work more varied, I became more focused solely on the web team, handing the UI team of to someone who I had previously mentored. Development is heavily unit, and integration, tested, and I was also responsible for creating ADO pipelines for continuous integration and deployment, as well as building the hosting platforms in Azure. I maintain the website’s back-end codebase, and infrastructure, and more recently I have been responsible for migrating the services from.net framework to the more modern.net 8.0. During my time at Rare I have been involved in several high-profile projects, gaining invaluable knowledge on cloud security and website accessibility.