Backend Engineer

Devoted Studios; United States; Remote; USD 86,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full-time benefits in Quebec Province

Job summary

Devoted Studios is a globally remote game development partner specializing in Co-development, Porting, and End-to-End Art Production. The team builds scalable Java services on AWS, using MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Redis, with a strong emphasis on live production reliability and cross-platform client integration.

The role focuses on service design, deployment pipelines, observability, and engineering standards across live game backends—joining an expert team that ships at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional backend/server-side engineering experience with live production scale.
• Proven Java shipping experience in production environments.
• Hands-on ownership of AWS infrastructure (provision, deploy, monitor, debug).
• Fluency with multiple data stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) and appropriate usage.
• Experience designing REST APIs for game/client integration.
• End-to-end ownership: on-call, post-mortems, and remediation.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, resilient web services for game clients (PC/console/mobile).
• Own data models and choose suitable stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis).
• Design clear, versioned REST APIs with stable contracts and good client experience.
• Architect services for live game load and graceful degradation.
• Define service boundaries and cross-team integration points.
• Instrument services for production readiness with logging, metrics, tracing, and health checks.
• Respond to incidents and write post-mortems with follow-up actions.

Skills

Java

AWS

REST APIs

On-call

Post-mortems

Data modeling

Tools

MongoDB

DynamoDB

Redis

EKS / Kubernetes

Job description

Devoted Studios is a globally remote game development company specializing in Co-development, Porting, and End-to-End Art Production for the global gaming industry.

Our team includes world-class talents who bring deep expertise in external development, pipeline optimization, and creative problem-solving. Whether it’s porting games to new systems, enhancing gameplay features, or crafting stunning visuals, Devoted Studios operates as a trusted, flexible extension of our partners’ internal teams.

We are proud to be the development partner of choice for industry leaders such as:

• Epic
• Xbox
• Meta
• Obsidian Entertainment
• Riot
• Gearbox Software

This is not a server-side feature developer who hands services to an ops team once they ship. It is an engineer who architects the service, deploys it, monitors it in production, responds when it breaks, and improves it after every incident.

Key Responsibilities

Service Design & Architecture

• Design and build scalable, resilient web services in Java and/or Scala that support game client needs across PC, console, and mobile
• Own the data model — choose the right store (MongoDB for flexible document storage, DynamoDB for key-value at scale, Redis for caching and session state) and justify it
• Design REST APIs that game clients actually integrate well against — clear contracts, versioned, documented, forgiving of client-side variation
• Architect for the load profile of a live game: average load, launch spikes, event peaks, and graceful degradation when upstream dependencies fail
• Define and enforce service boundaries — knows where one service ends and another begins, and why

AWS Infrastructure & Deployment

• Build and maintain AWS infrastructure using IaC tooling (CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation — confirm what's in use on the engagement)
• Own the deployment pipeline for services they build: CI/CD configuration, environment promotion, rollback capability
• Right-size AWS resources for cost and performance — does not default to over-provisioning and does not leave obvious cost inefficiencies
• Familiar with the AWS services relevant to game backends: EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda (where appropriate), API Gateway, ElastiCache, SQS/SNS, CloudWatch, S3
• Understands the network and security posture of services exposed to game clients — VPC design, security groups, IAM least privilege, secrets management

Live Operation & Observability

• Instruments every service for production readiness: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, health checks, and alerting before it goes live — not after the first incident
• Monitors services in production: reads dashboards, interprets anomalies, distinguishes noise from signal
• Responds to production incidents in services they own — has on-call responsibilities commensurate with service criticality
• Writes post-mortems and follows through on structural improvements so the same failure mode does not recur
• Understands the difference between a symptom and a root cause — does not fix symptoms

Cross-Platform Client Integration

• Works directly with game client engineers (PC, console, mobile) to define integration contracts, review client-side usage patterns, and debug integration issues
• Understands the constraints of each platform environment: console certification requirements around network usage, mobile data sensitivity, PC permissiveness — and designs service interfaces accordingly
• Owns the integration surface: API documentation that is correct, versioned, and kept up to date as the service evolves
• Participates in client-facing technical reviews where backend service design is on the table

Quality & Engineering Standards

• Writes unit and integration tests as a first-class output — not an afterthought
• Code reviews: gives specific, actionable feedback and receives it without defensiveness
• Maintains service documentation: architecture decisions, operational runbooks, known limitations, dependency map
• Raises technical debt explicitly — names it, quantifies its cost, and proposes a remediation path

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional backend/server-side engineering experience with at least 3 years working on services at live production scale
• Java at a professional shipping level — not just familiarity. Has designed, built, and operated Java services in production.
• AWS hands-on ownership — has provisioned, deployed, monitored, and debugged AWS infrastructure, not just used managed services provisioned by someone else
• Polyglot data store fluency: has made deliberate choices between MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Redis for different use cases — not defaulted to one store for everything
• REST API design with real client integration experience — PC, console, or mobile clients consuming services they built
• End-to-end ownership mindset: has been on-call for services they wrote. Has written a post-mortem. Has shipped the fix.

Preferred

• Experience designing services that handle launch-day spikes: horizontal scaling patterns, queue-based load levelling, circuit breakers
• Familiarity with platform-specific SDK constraints: PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Nintendo NSO, or Apple/Google mobile — understanding what the platform restricts and what it requires from the backend
• Kafka or SQS/SNS for event-driven service communication
• Kubernetes (EKS) cluster operations experience
• Security-conscious engineering: OAuth/OIDC, rate limiting, input validation, OWASP awareness at service design level

Benefits

This is a full-time employment role with standard benefits in Quebec Province