Lead Backend Engineer

Role overview Lead a backend engineering team building the services behind a multiplayer game. The role combines people management with hands-on architecture and development, while keeping systems reliable and coordinating technical decisions with creative and production partners.

Responsibilities - Mentor and develop backend engineers, set team goals, and guide hiring and interviews. - Establish workable team practices for planning, code review, estimation, on-call support, and bug triage. - Shape backend architecture and contribute production code to critical systems. - Own service reliability, service level objectives, incident response, and infrastructure costs. - Coordinate feature scope and technical roadmaps with design, production, marketing, and technical leadership; communicate risks and trade-offs clearly.

Requirements - At least six years of professional backend engineering experience and two years managing or leading engineers. - Strong Kotlin or Java skills, with familiarity in Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform, and load-testing tools. - Experience scaling backend systems for a global audience and handling their monitoring, alerting, and debugging needs. - Sound software architecture judgment, including knowing when to use established patterns and when to keep solutions simple. - Experience collaborating across disciplines on a shipped or in-development game. - Clear communication and comfort taking broad ownership in a lean team.

Nice to have - Experience launching and operating a live-service game after release. - Background at an independent or mid-sized studio.

Benefits and work setup - Fully remote team distributed across North American time zones. - Listed benefits include stock options, health coverage, disability and life insurance, retirement contributions, and paid parental leave; availability may depend on country and employment arrangement.