Lead Backend Engineer, Live Ops (AAA Games) - Remote

2K; United States; Remote; USD 169,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

31st Union is seeking a Lead Game Services Engineer to lead the team building and running studio-hosted services. You will manage backend engineers in US/EU studios, own the architecture, and drive major architectural decisions.

You will be the first contact for backend incidents and work directly with the Director - Online Services. The role is based in San Mateo, CA, and is open to fully remote candidates.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of server-side development experience with CS or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Led or managed backend engineers on a shipped AAA title, preferably live-service or competitive multiplayer game.
• Fluent in C#, and proficient in Python or Go.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems, concurrency and scalable service design.
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or DocumentDB, and with Redis.
• Has deployed and operated production services on AWS.
• Gives direct, constructive feedback and invites it from others.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend engineering team: conduct regular 1:1s, set goals, provide feedback, and drive hiring.
• Oversee backend planning: manage backlog, estimate work, and set sprint priorities.
• Define engineering standards for code review, testing, documentation and on-call readiness.
• Own architecture of studio-hosted services and infrastructure, service boundaries, data models, APIs, and deployment topology.
• Scope backend work for new game features and review designs for major changes.
• Implement and review implementations for proprietary studio backend services.
• Align backend roadmap with studio release schedule and manage deployments.
• Maintain CI pipelines and deployment automation for services.
• Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks and incident reporting for studio services.
• Lead backend on-call rotation and act as first responder for incidents.
• Load test services before major releases and optimize performance and costs.
• Implement and test failover and disaster recovery for services and data.
• Integrate studio proprietary services with 2K and external platform services.
• Debug cross-service issues with external engineering partners.

Skills

Backend leadership

C# proficiency

Python or Go

Distributed systems

NoSQL (MongoDB/DocumentDB)

Redis

AWS production services

Code review/on-call

Live service / MMO experience

Performance optimization

Education

Bachelor's in CS

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm

Unreal Engine

C++

Job description

31st Union is seeking a Lead Game Services Engineer to lead the team building and running studio-hosted services. You will manage backend engineers in US/EU studios, own the architecture, and drive major architectural decisions.

You will be the first contact for backend incidents and work directly with the Director - Online Services. The role is based in San Mateo, CA, and is open to fully remote candidates.