Backend Server Engineer (MMORPG) - GCP

SpiderWare; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% remote (GMT/BST overlap)

Contract role with extension post‑laun

Full-time consideration for excellent候

Indie team of 25

Job summary

Soulbound, a London-based indie game studio, is seeking backend engineers to scale our real-time MMO infrastructure. You will work with CTO on systems keeping thousands of players connected, using GKE, Kafka, MongoDB and PostgreSQL, building stateful game servers and event-driven services to 10x current scale.

You will optimize deployments, observability, and resilience, implement IaC with Terraform/Helm, and collaborate with a small senior team.

Qualifications

• Experience building real-time MMO backends and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes-based deployments and scaling.
• Proficiency with MongoDB and PostgreSQL in high-concurrency environments.
• Experience with Terraform/Helm for IaC and deployments.
• Observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana) and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Build, optimise, and scale backend services powering real-time multiplayer gameplay.
• Work with GKE, Helm, and Kubernetes to manage deployments and autoscaling.
• Improve observability: dashboards, alerting, and incident response.
• Scale distributed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL) under high load.
• Optimise Kafka event streaming for player actions and inter-service communication.
• Identify bottlenecks and improve resilience to prevent cascading failures.
• Collaborate on architectural decisions with a small, senior engineering team.

Skills

Backend engineering

Kubernetes

Kafka

MongoDB

PostgreSQL

Terraform

Prometheus/Grafana

GKE

Observability

CI/CD

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Redis

Pub/Sub

Istio

Job description

Soulbound, a cutting-edge indie game studio based in London, building a cross-platform MMORPG with pixel art aesthetics and browser-based access. We've built infrastructure for a single-shard game world that spins up localised regional clusters for instanced combat, delivering low-latency action RPG gameplay with the flexibility for players to play with anyone, from anywhere in the world, at any time. The game features real-time player-shared worlds, co-op dungeons, 10-player raids, player housing, questing, online and offline background crafting, auction houses, and live chat. All of it running simultaneously, all of it real-time.

The Role

We need backend engineers who can help us scale this infrastructure for launch and beyond. You'll work directly with our CTO on the systems that keep thousands of players connected, fighting, trading, and exploring in the same world simultaneously. Our backend is 60+ microservices running on Google Kubernetes Engine. Stateful game servers, event-driven architecture with Kafka, MongoDB and PostgreSQL databases, WebSocket real-time communication, and multi-cluster orchestration. The system works at current scale, your job is making it work at 10x that. This role is perfect for a passionate individual contributor eager to tackle some of the most thrilling, challenging, and distinctive problems in contemporary software development. The real-time demands of an online MMO present a one-of-a-kind opportunity, and we're searching for the brilliant mind ready to dive into these intricate, interconnected systems.

What You'll Do

• Build, optimise, and scale backend services powering real-time multiplayer gameplay
• Work with GKE, Helm, and Kubernetes to manage deployments and autoscaling for stateful game servers
• Improve observability: monitoring dashboards, alerting (Prometheus/Grafana or GCP Cloud Monitoring), and incident response
• Scale distributed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL) under high concurrent load
• Optimise Kafka event streaming for player actions, game state, and inter-service communication
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks before they become player-facing problems
• Improve resilience and prevent cascading failures across services
• Collaborate on architectural decisions with a small, senior engineering team

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (ideally GKE) in production
• Real experience scaling distributed systems under load.
• Worked with at least some of: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, pub/sub systems
• Comfortable with monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, or equivalent)
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Helm)
• Self-directed.
• Github/linkedin portfolio

What Sets You Apart

• Experience with game backends or real-time multiplayer systems
• Passion for MMO gaming experiences and understanding of MMO products in the market.
• Worked with stateful server architectures (dedicated game servers)
• Experience with custom game server orchestration on Kubernetes
• Familiarity with Istio service mesh
• Previous work at a game studio, especially on live service/MMO titles
• A passion for the unique problems presented when operating a large scale MMO like this.

• 100% remote, must overlap significantly with UK (GMT/BST) hours.
• Contract role, 4-8 weeks initially with extension likely post-launch
• Full-time preferred, flexible for exceptional candidates
• Competitive salary / monthly rate.
• Become a valued member of our close-knit, passionate indie team of 25.
• Play a key role in creating a groundbreaking virtual world that will captivate and welcome millions of players.