Its bulking season for the next gen Xbox team. While we are all waiting for official word about next generation follow ups for both Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4, there has been a (very) slow drip of news hints as to what we can expect. Four new job postings, three as recent as 10 days ago, listed on Microsoft’s career page show that the next gen Xbox hardware team is staffing up. All positions listed are for engineers. Two of which are hardware focused, while the others are split between storage and electrical engineering within hardware like accessories.

Back in April of 2018, IGN posted a similar job listing for a Senior Electrical Engineer. At the time, the Xbox team was looking for an engineer experienced with DDR3, DDR5 and DRAM technologies. One of the more recent postings from October 24 2018, an Electrical Engineer job post indicates that “Xbox is looking for candidates experienced with not just HDD, but also SSD and flash storage.” This seems like the natural progression as fancy solid state drive and flash storage is slowly (but surely) coming down to more affordable, mass market pricing.

The Senior Electrical Engineer job post invites candidates to “Come be part of what’s next.” Candidates selected for this role will be working on upcoming Xbox Accessories and will “lead the electrical development of our next generation accessories.” Which I personally hope it translates to: your job will be to help us “USB type C” everything.

Out of all newly listed openings, the “Mechanical Engineer Xbox” position is easily the most exciting. “The Xbox Development Team is looking for a highly motivated and collaborative Mechanical Engineer to contribute to the mechanical system development of our next generation consoles.” Consoles. Plural.

Back at E3 2018, Xbox head Phil Spencer stated that the team was “deep into architecting” the next gen Xbox consoles, but we still don’t know if we’re receiving two next generation consoles with one being 100% disc based. We could also possibly see a true next generation console and perhaps a (more affordable and) final revision to the Xbox One before it rides off into the sunset.

An early report from Brad Sams at Thurott alludes to the idea that Xbox’s Project Scarlett includes a “family of devices” but its still unclear if all would include next gen Xbox experiences. Regardless, it looks like the team at Xbox is clearly getting ready to put to (hardware) finishing touches on their next consoles.

Posted: Nov 26, 2018 8:14 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/next-gen-xbox-jobs/