Remote Backend Engineer — Real-Time MMO Systems

Soulbound; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 67,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote role with UK hours

Job summary

Soulbound, a London-based indie game studio, seeks backend engineers to scale a real-time MMO backend on Kubernetes. You will work with stateful game servers, Kafka, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and multi-cluster orchestration to support thousands of players across regions.

The role emphasizes building scalable services, improving observability, and collaborating with a senior team on architecture. 100% remote, overlapping UK hours, contract 4–8 weeks with possible extension.

Qualifications

• Hands-on production Kubernetes (GKE preferred) experience.
• Experience scaling distributed systems under load.
• Experience with MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, pub/sub.
• Familiar with monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager).
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Helm).
• Self-directed with a portfolio on GitHub/LinkedIn.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

GKE

Kafka

MongoDB

PostgreSQL

Redis

Pub/Sub

Prometheus

Grafana

Terraform

Helm

Self-directed

GitHub profile

LinkedIn profile

Job description

Soulbound, a London-based indie game studio, seeks backend engineers to scale a real-time MMO backend on Kubernetes. You will work with stateful game servers, Kafka, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and multi-cluster orchestration to support thousands of players across regions.

The role emphasizes building scalable services, improving observability, and collaborating with a senior team on architecture. 100% remote, overlapping UK hours, contract 4–8 weeks with possible extension.