This role is for a strong individual contributor who has already experienced real production pressure: high traffic, live events, urgent fixes, scaling challenges, release issues, data correctness problems, and systems that must remain operational while players are actively using them.

In other words, this is not just “write backend code and hope staging was honest.”

You will work on backend services, gameplay-adjacent systems, live operations infrastructure, API design, databases, caching, telemetry, and internal operational tools. The right person is technically strong, but also calm and practical when traffic spikes, incidents appear, or product requirements change right before launch.

Backend engineers in this role are trusted to own important systems from start to finish: design, implementation, release, monitoring, debugging, and post-launch improvement. This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants meaningful responsibility and has the judgment to handle it.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services for a live mobile game using Go, gRPC, REST, protobuf, MySQL, Redis, and service-to-service APIs.

• Own backend systems connected to gameplay and live operations, such as inventory, IAP, live events, leaderboards, messaging, notifications, guild/social features, scheduling, player state, and live configuration.

• Build systems that remain safe and reliable during live operations, including remote configuration, event launches, timed campaigns, content updates, rollbacks, partial failures, and client/server version mismatches.

• Design APIs and data flows that support live mobile clients, including backward compatibility, retries, duplicate requests, poor network conditions, stale client state, and version differences.

• Investigate and resolve production issues using logs, metrics, traces, database state, Redis state, service health, client reports, and live player impact.

• Work closely with Unity client engineers, game designers, QA, production, data, and product stakeholders to turn unclear feature goals into reliable live-service behavior.

• Improve backend architecture, deployment safety, operational visibility, test coverage, and engineering quality through thoughtful design and code review.

• Support live features after launch, especially during high-volume events, releases, and time-sensitive campaigns.

• Help make sure that when a major event goes live, the backend does not quietly start looking for another career.

Requirements - Hard Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally focused on backend or server-side development for production systems.

• Experience designing, building, and operating complex backend services.

• Experience across the full software development lifecycle, from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

• Proficiency with at least two programming languages, including one or more of the following: Go, Node.js, or C#.

• Strong understanding of relational databases, including data modeling, queries, transactions, consistency, and performance.

• Understanding of Unix/networking fundamentals, including files, sockets, and service communication.

• Experience with Docker and containerized applications.

• B.S. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Requirements - Mindset & Traits

• Strong production debugging instincts, including logs, metrics, traces, service health, database state, cache behavior, and user impact.

• Ability to reason clearly about reliability, scalability, latency, retries, idempotency, failure modes, and operational safety.

• Strong sense of ownership, initiative, and accountability.

• Comfortable working independently while communicating clearly with engineers, designers, QA, production, data, and product teams.

• Willing to roll up your sleeves and solve the problem wherever it lives: code, architecture, deployment, logs, dashboards, or that one suspicious Redis key nobody wants to touch.

• Proficiency in English.

You may be a strong fit if you have the following experience

• Backend systems for online mobile games or other high-traffic live products.

• Live-service game systems such as events, inventory, IAP, rewards, leaderboards, player progression, social features, notifications, or live configuration.

• Supporting production systems during launches, traffic spikes, live events, urgent fixes, or incident response.

• Building cloud-native applications on AWS.

• Working with Amazon EKS, Kubernetes, or similar container orchestration platforms.

• Collaborating closely with Unity client teams.

• Understanding Unity game development concepts, even if your main focus is backend engineering.

• Full-stack development.

• Designing backend systems that mobile clients can depend on even when networks are unreliable, clients are outdated, and players find creative ways to break assumptions.