At a glance
- Experience
- 10+ years experience
- Workplace
- Remote
- Location
- San Mateo
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship not offered
About the role
- 31st Union is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to lead the team that builds and runs studio-hosted services for Project ETHOS.
- The role involves managing backend engineers across US and EU studios, owning service and infrastructure architecture, and writing code alongside the team.
Responsibilities
- 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 deploy backend hotfixes through the studio hotfix process.
- Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks and incident reporting for studio services.
- Run the backend on-call rotation, and act as first responder and escalation point for backend incidents.
- Integrate studio proprietary services with 2K and external platform services.
Requirements
- 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.
Preferred qualifications
- 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.
Benefits
- Bonus and/or equity awards
- Medical, financial, and/or other benefits
Workplace
- Based in the San Mateo, California studio
- Open to fully remote candidates
Skills
- C#
- Python
- Go
- MongoDB
- DocumentDB
- Redis
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- Helm
- MQTT
- C++
- Unreal Engine
