Lead Backend Engineer

San Mateo · 10+ years experience · Remote · Posted Oct 15, 2026

At a glance

31st Union is looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to lead the team that builds and runs studio-hosted services.
You will manage backend engineers across US and EU studios, own the architecture of services and infrastructure, and write code alongside the team.
This role serves as the first point of contact for backend technical decisions and backend incidents, reporting to the Director of Online Services.

Manage backend engineering team: hold regular 1:1s, set goals, give performance feedback, and lead hiring.
Run the backend team's planning: maintain the backlog, estimate work, and set sprint priorities against the online services roadmap.
Set the team's engineering standards for code review, testing, documentation and on-call readiness.
Own the architecture of our studio-hosted services and infrastructure, including service boundaries, data models, APIs and deployment topology.
Scope backend work for new game features and write/review technical designs for new services and major changes.
Implement and review implementations for proprietary studio backend services.
Align backend roadmap with studio release schedule, and diagnose, fix and deploy backend hotfixes.
Maintain the continuous integration pipelines and deployment automation for our services.
Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks and incident reporting for studio services while running the backend on-call rotation.
Load test services before major releases, fix performance bottlenecks, optimize service costs, and implement failover and disaster recovery.

10+ years of server-side development experience, complemented by a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Has led or managed backend engineers on a shipped AAA title, preferably a live-service or competitive multiplayer game.
Fluent in C#, and proficient in Python or Go.
Strong grasp of distributed systems, concurrency and scalable service design.
Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or DocumentDB, and with Redis.
Has deployed and operated production services on AWS.
Gives direct, constructive feedback and invites it from others.

Kubernetes, Helm and microservice architectures.
Profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including database queries and service calls.
Real-time messaging, such as MQTT, and API gateways.
C++ and Unreal Engine.
Online game systems such as matchmaking, social, progression, commerce and telemetry.
Running a live title: incident response, capacity planning and cost management.

This role is based in the San Mateo, California studio and is open to fully remote candidates.