Lead Backend Engineer — Live Ops & Cloud Architecture

31stunion; San Mateo (CA); Remote; USD 169,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

31st Union, based in San Mateo, California, seeks a Lead Backend Engineer to guide the team building and running our studio-hosted services. You will own architecture, data models, APIs, and deployment topology, and lead backend incidents while collaborating with US and EU studios.

You will drive planning, code quality, and platform integration, mentoring engineers and setting standards for reliability, performance, and scalability across the live-service game. Remote work is supported.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of server-side development with a Bachelor's degree in CS or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Led backend engineers on a shipped AAA title, preferably a 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: manage backend engineers in US and EU studios; 1:1s, goals, performance feedback, hiring.
• Plan backend work: backlog, estimates, sprint priorities against the online services roadmap.
• Set engineering standards for code review, testing, docs, on-call readiness.
• Own architecture of studio-hosted services and infrastructure; data models, APIs, deployment topology.
• Align backend roadmap with studio release schedule; diagnose and deploy hotfixes; maintain CI pipelines and deployment automation.
• Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks and incident reporting; on-call rotation and incident response.
• Integrate studio services with external platform services; debug cross-service issues with partners.

Skills

C#

Python

Go

Distributed systems

NoSQL (MongoDB)

Redis

AWS

Leadership

Code review

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm

Microservice architectures

API gateways

Job description

31st Union, based in San Mateo, California, seeks a Lead Backend Engineer to guide the team building and running our studio-hosted services. You will own architecture, data models, APIs, and deployment topology, and lead backend incidents while collaborating with US and EU studios.

You will drive planning, code quality, and platform integration, mentoring engineers and setting standards for reliability, performance, and scalability across the live-service game. Remote work is supported.