I believe this is to work on the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO they've been "secretly" working on for several years now.

https://jobs.ea.com/jobs/jobposting.aspx?refresh=1&postid=a0z50000000HZSI

BioWare Austin is looking for qualified Java/J2EE Programmer for our platform group to help create and maintain MMO platform systems. Platform systems include ecommerce, subscriptions, business intelligence, global game systems (like chat or event logging), metrics, customer service tools, and other game systems global to the game service. The successful candidate will have expert knowledge of and experience in the design, implementation, and continuing support of J2EE enterprise applications. Extensive experience and knowledge of highly scalable, fault tolerant, uniformly designed, object oriented, distributed applications is required. End to end knowledge of application architecture from RDBMS to web browser is also required for this job.

Preferred Skills

· Any exposure to Struts, Hibernate, Log4j or the Spring Framework, as well as HTML templating engines such as Velocity or FreeMarker.

· Exposure to J2EE Application Containers such as Sun Glassfish, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, JBoss, Jonas or Resin a definite plus.

· E-Commerce or Customer service applications experience.

· Game industry experience.

· Platform system experience.

Even if they are only in need of a web monkey, this could be a great way to shift your ass away slightly from the insurance/finance/whatever world over to the game development business.

You just have to go to right place.

I'm doing game development in a startup and I have a great time. The payoff (if the game does well) is also significantly higher than the typical software job.

I quite liked working for an insurance company (Chubb Insurance in London as it happened).

Still, we don't have much in the way of Java-based games startups in the UK...

Cas

Looks good.  Sadly, most of the jobs they list for the US, UK, and other high currency countries are pretend.

EA does a majority of the software they produce outside of the U.S. while they get subsidies here in Texas to keep me as slave labor.