Remote Lead Backend Engineer - Live Game Studio

Gardens Interactive; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salaries

Stock options

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Life insurance

Disability insurance

RRSP / DPSP contributions

Parental leave

Fully distributed remote studio

Job summary

Gardens Interactive is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer for our fully remote studio. You will lead a team of backend engineers, evolve critical systems, and own reliability and cost.

Collaboration with game design, marketing, and production will ensure engineering remains aligned with the creative vision. The role requires 6+ years in backend, 2+ years in leadership, and strong Kotlin/Java with Kubernetes, Grafana, and Terraform experience.

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 vs. 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

• Review pull requests and unblock engineers on hard technical problems.
• 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 with game design, marketing, and production to scope features and align with the creative vision.
• Partner with the Technical Director to create a realistic technical roadmap.
• Communicate engineering status, risks, and trade‑offs clearly to studio leadership.

Skills

Kotlin

Java

Backend architecture

Team leadership

Scalability

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Grafana

Terraform

Load testing tools

Job description

Gardens Interactive is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer for our fully remote studio. You will lead a team of backend engineers, evolve critical systems, and own reliability and cost.

Collaboration with game design, marketing, and production will ensure engineering remains aligned with the creative vision. The role requires 6+ years in backend, 2+ years in leadership, and strong Kotlin/Java with Kubernetes, Grafana, and Terraform experience.