Backend Server Engineer (MMORPG) - GCP
You will scale and optimize the backend systems that keep thousands of players connected and interacting in real time. You will work on 60+ microservices and stateful game servers, tuning Kubernetes deployments, autoscaling, event streaming, and databases. You will improve monitoring and alerting, resolve bottlenecks, and harden resilience to prevent cascading failures. You will collaborate on architecture decisions and own production incident response to keep gameplay smooth under high concurrent load.
Responsibilities
- Build backend services for real-time multiplayer gameplay
- Optimize and scale backend services to support 10x load
- Manage GKE, Helm, and Kubernetes deployments and autoscaling for stateful game servers
- Improve observability via monitoring dashboards, alerting, and incident response
- Scale distributed databases under high concurrent load
- Optimize Kafka event streaming for game state and inter-service communication
- Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks
- Improve system resilience and prevent cascading failures
- Collaborate on architectural decisions with engineering leadership
Requirements
- Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes (ideally GKE)
- Experience scaling distributed systems under load
- Experience with one or more of MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, or pub/sub systems
- Familiarity with monitoring stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Helm)
- Self-directed with strong ownership of production systems
Benefits
- 100% remote with significant overlap with UK (GMT/BST) hours required
- Contract role (initial 4–8 weeks) with likely extension post-launch
- Flexible full-time arrangement available for exceptional candidates