Remote Real-Time MMO Backend Engineer

Spiderware; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 78,000 - 123,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work (UK hours overlap)

Contract role: 4-8 weeks

Competitive monthly salary

Job summary

Spiderware, a London-based indie game studio, is hiring backend engineers to scale a cross-platform MMORPG backend built on Google Kubernetes Engine. You’ll work with the CTO on high-performance, real-time systems handling thousands of players in a single world.

Ideal candidates have hands-on Kubernetes in production, experience with MongoDB/PostgreSQL/Kafka/Redis, and strong IaC skills (Terraform/Helm). Remote role overlapping UK hours with contract-based terms.

Qualifications

• Hands-on Kubernetes in production.
• Experience scaling distributed systems under load.
• Worked with MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis.
• Comfortable with monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana).
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Helm).
• Self-directed with GitHub/LinkedIn portfolio.

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, and incident response.
• Scale distributed databases under high concurrent load.
• Optimise Kafka event streaming for player actions and inter-service communication.
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks; improve resilience across services.
• Collaborate on architectural decisions with a small, senior engineering team.

Skills

Kubernetes

GKE

Terraform

Helm

MongoDB

PostgreSQL

Kafka

Redis

Prometheus

Grafana

WebSocket

Distributed systems

Tools

Docker

Git

CI/CD pipelines

Istio

Kafka

GCP

Job description

Spiderware, a London-based indie game studio, is hiring backend engineers to scale a cross-platform MMORPG backend built on Google Kubernetes Engine. You’ll work with the CTO on high-performance, real-time systems handling thousands of players in a single world.

Ideal candidates have hands-on Kubernetes in production, experience with MongoDB/PostgreSQL/Kafka/Redis, and strong IaC skills (Terraform/Helm). Remote role overlapping UK hours with contract-based terms.