Remote Lead Backend Services Engineer – Live Ops

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus potential

Medical benefits

Job summary

31st Union is seeking a Lead Game Services Engineer in California to lead a backend team, own architecture for studio-hosted services, and guide integration with external platforms. You will manage performances, plan backlogs, and set coding standards while coordinating with US and EU studios.

The role combines hands-on coding in C#, Python/Go, and C++, with extensive experience in distributed systems, AWS, and Unreal Engine.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of server-side development 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 (MongoDB/DocumentDB) and Redis.
• Deployed and operated production services on AWS.
• Kubernetes, Helm and microservice architectures.
• Profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including database queries and service calls.
• Real-time messaging (MQTT) and API gateways.
• C++ and Unreal Engine.
• Online game systems such as matchmaking, social, progression, commerce and telemetry.
• Running a live title: incident response, capacity planning and cost management.

Responsibilities

• Manage backend engineering team: hold regular 1:1s, set goals, give performance feedback, and lead hiring.
• Run the backend team's planning: maintain the backlog, estimate work, and set sprint priorities against the online services roadmap.
• Set the team's engineering standards for code review, testing, documentation and on-call readiness.
• Own the architecture of studio-hosted services and infrastructure, including service boundaries, data models, APIs and deployment topology.
• Scope backend work for new game features.
• Write and review technical designs for new services and major changes.
• Implement and review implementations for proprietary studio backend services.
• Align backend roadmap with studio release schedule.
• Diagnose, fix and deploy backend hotfixes through the studio hotfix process.
• Maintain CI pipelines and deployment automation for our services.
• Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks and incident reporting for studio services.
• Run the backend on-call rotation, act as first responder and escalation point for backend incidents.
• Load test services before major releases, fix performance bottlenecks, and optimize service costs.
• Implement and test failover and disaster recovery for our services and their data.
• Integrate studio proprietary services with external platform services.
• Debug cross-service issues with external engineering partners.

Skills

C#

Python

Go

C++

Unreal Engine

Distributed systems

AWS

NoSQL (MongoDB/DocumentDB)

Redis

Kubernetes

Helm

API design

Real-time messaging (MQTT)

Online game systems

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Equivalent experience

Tools

Docker

AWS tooling

Job description

31st Union is seeking a Lead Game Services Engineer in California to lead a backend team, own architecture for studio-hosted services, and guide integration with external platforms. You will manage performances, plan backlogs, and set coding standards while coordinating with US and EU studios.

The role combines hands-on coding in C#, Python/Go, and C++, with extensive experience in distributed systems, AWS, and Unreal Engine.