Remote Lead Backend Engineer - Games & Live Ops

BranchFactor; Los Angeles (CA); Remote; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & transparency

Stock options

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Life and disability insurance

401(k) / RRSP + DPSP contributions

Paid parental leave

Fully distributed remote studio across

Job summary

Gardens Interactive seeks a Lead Backend Engineer to grow and mentor a team building scalable backend systems for our gaming platform. You will own architecture, reliability, and cross-functional collaboration with design, marketing, and production.

You will partner with the Technical Director to define a pragmatic technical roadmap, review PRs, and drive on-call readiness while maintaining high ownership in a lean studio.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional backend experience, with games/live-service development strongly preferred.
• 2+ years of experience directly managing or leading engineers.
• Strong Kotlin or Java skills and familiarity with Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform, and load-testing tools.
• Hands-on experience with scaling backend systems to a global audience and the debugging, monitoring, and alerting challenges that come with it.
• Solid grasp of software architecture and design patterns, and the judgment to know when to apply them versus keep things simple.
• Experience working cross-functionally with design, marketing, and production on a shipped or in-development game.

Responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers: set goals, run 1:1s, give feedback, and support career development.
• Own team processes: planning, code review standards, on-call/bug triage, and how work gets scoped and estimated.
• Create hiring plans and interview technical candidates based on product needs.
• Own the evolution of our backend architecture and write production code on critical-path systems.
• Own reliability, service level objectives, incident response, and infrastructure cost.
• Partner closely with game design, marketing, and production to scope features and keep engineering aligned with the creative vision.

Skills

Kotlin

Java

Tools

Kubernetes

Grafana

Terraform

Load testing

Job description

Gardens Interactive seeks a Lead Backend Engineer to grow and mentor a team building scalable backend systems for our gaming platform. You will own architecture, reliability, and cross-functional collaboration with design, marketing, and production.

You will partner with the Technical Director to define a pragmatic technical roadmap, review PRs, and drive on-call readiness while maintaining high ownership in a lean studio.