Founding Engineer: AI-Driven Backend for Live Sports

Electronic Arts; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 100,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Mental well-being support

Retirement savings

Paid time off

Family leaves

Complimentary games

Job summary

Electronic Arts seeks a founding engineer to own the technology behind Ventures products from 0 → 1 and beyond. This hands-on role focuses on scalable backend systems, end-to-end architecture, and AI-native practices across web, iOS, Android, and backend services.

You will design and operate real-time experiences, build platform capabilities, and ensure reliable production systems with observability and cost awareness. Strong Go/gRPC and distributed-systems background required.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including taking consumer products from 0 → 1 and operating them in production.
• Deep backend expertise designing, building, and operating scalable distributed systems, ideally in Go with gRPC and Protocol Buffers.
• Experience with event-driven and real-time architectures, including message streaming such as NATS JetStream or Kafka, and durable workflows such as Temporal.
• Strong data modelling across relational, document, and in-memory stores such as PostgreSQL, Firestore, Redis.
• Experience running production services in the cloud, ideally Google Cloud and Kubernetes (GKE), with IaC such as Pulumi or Terraform, CI/CD, and observability through OpenTelemetry.
• Experience building software with AI coding agents, or a strong, demonstrable interest in doing so.
• Web and mobile fluency to architect features end to end, e.g. SwiftUI on iOS, Kotlin on Android, React on Web.
• Proven ability to own a system end to end and make sound technical decisions independently.
• Experience shipping user-facing changes safely with feature flags, staged rollouts, and production monitoring.
• Experience building real-time, social, sports, gaming, or entertainment products, or as a founding engineer, is a strong plus.
• Experience building LLM-powered or agentic product features is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Help own the technical architecture and direction of Ventures products end to end, across backend services, cloud infrastructure, and web and native clients.
• Take new ideas from 0 → 1: build testable versions quickly to generate evidence, then harden what works for growth.
• Design, build, and operate scalable backend systems, including gRPC services, event streaming, and durable workflows that serve real-time experiences around live sport.
• Build platform capabilities such as social, predictions, and live content that multiple EA products can share.
• Architect for scale and failure: fan-out cost, backpressure, idempotency, reconnect behaviour, data growth, and recovery as audiences grow.
• Design features end to end across service and client boundaries, including API contracts, real-time delivery, and local-first sync on mobile.
• Build with AI coding agents as a core part of the workflow, and own the tooling, guardrails, and review practices for safe use.
• Own production: environments, deployments, infrastructure as code, observability, incident response, and cost management.
• Release user-facing changes safely through feature flags and staged rollouts with quality checks for load, security, and localisation.
• Integrate with EA platform services and third-party data/AI providers; set engineering standards for reviews and documentation.
• Partner with product and design to shape roadmaps and translate ideas into technical plans with clear trade-offs.
• Support and onboard new engineers and share architecture patterns and AI-native practices across Ventures.

Skills

Go

gRPC

Distributed systems

Event-driven

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Temporal

Kafka

NATS JetStream

AI coding agents

SwiftUI

React

Kotlin/Jetpack

OpenTelemetry

Pulumi/Terraform

Code review

Tools

NATS JetStream

Temporal

Go

Kubernetes

Pulumi

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

SwiftUI

Jetpack Compose

React

gRPC

Job description

Electronic Arts seeks a founding engineer to own the technology behind Ventures products from 0 → 1 and beyond. This hands-on role focuses on scalable backend systems, end-to-end architecture, and AI-native practices across web, iOS, Android, and backend services.

You will design and operate real-time experiences, build platform capabilities, and ensure reliable production systems with observability and cost awareness. Strong Go/gRPC and distributed-systems background required.