SimCity Community Manager/Online Engineering Lead Derrick Schneider has announced via Twitter that he has decided to leave EA. He had been with the company under the Maxis team since 2008.

His LinkedIn work experience lists a number of EA software titles including Spore and SimCity:

Online Lead

Maxis

Online team lead for Spore and SimCity. On SimCity, architected, implemented, and launching SimCity. Designed the system for horizontal scalability (using EC2 for cloud bursting), cost management, system robustness (including using S3 and SQS), and scaling down as demand lessens. Responsible for virtually all of the architecture underlying the multiplayer aspects of the game and throughout the system. Worked closely with IT and load testing groups. Participated in budget discussions, planning meetings, code reviews, and design meetings. Extensive work designing and implementing game-to-server protocols based on REST and WebSockets. Extensive performance work based on analyses ranging from heap dumps and thread dumps to higher-order metrics.

Leading a team of up to 5 engineers with focuses on iterative development, automation, unit testing, metrics, continual refactoring, and communication and education to people outside the team.

On Spore, responsible for helping launch the site, optimizing it, and maintaining it. Responsible for cost-cutting measures to keep the site profitable.

Back in July of 2012, he was featured in a ‘Get To Know’ blog article for SimCity, which you can read here.