Remote Lead Backend Engineer - Games & Scale

Gardens; California; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salaries and pay透明

Stock options

Medical, dental, and vision coverage (

Life insurance, disability

401(k)/RRSP + DPSP

Paid parental leave

Fully distributed remote studio

Job summary

Gardens, a fully distributed game studio, is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to guide and grow our backend team. You will own backend architecture, production code, reliability, and cost, while collaborating with game design, marketing, and production to deliver scalable, live-service systems for a global audience.

You’ll thrive leading engineers across a lean, ownership-focused team in a remote North American time‑zone setup, communicating trade-offs clearly and shaping a practical, ambitious

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.
• Comfortable operating with high ownership in a lean team where you wear multiple hats.
• Strong communication skills: able to explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and rally a small team around a plan.

Responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and grow a backend team.
• Own evolution of backend architecture and production code on critical-path systems.
• Own reliability, service level objectives, incident response, and infrastructure cost.
• Partner with game design, marketing, and production to scope features and align engineering with the creative vision.
• Communicate engineering status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to studio leadership.

Skills

Backend development

Team leadership

Kotlin

Java

System architecture

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

Ownership

Tools

Kubernetes

Grafana

Terraform

Load testing

Job description

Gardens, a fully distributed game studio, is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to guide and grow our backend team. You will own backend architecture, production code, reliability, and cost, while collaborating with game design, marketing, and production to deliver scalable, live-service systems for a global audience.

You’ll thrive leading engineers across a lean, ownership-focused team in a remote North American time‑zone setup, communicating trade-offs clearly and shaping a practical, ambitious