Backend Software Engineer (Gameplay Focused)

Remote - US

Backend Engineer (Gameplay focus)

Remote – US and Canada only

thatgamecompany is best recognized for creating award-winning, enriching, and meaningful game titles such as Journey, Flower, and flOw. Our most recent game, Sky, is our most complex undertaking to date. It is a social network built around the values inherited from a powerful humanistic story. It is a live experience continuously evolving inside a global online theme park. 

We are seeking passionate engineers to join us in building various backend core technology as platforms, including but not limited to:

• Microservices running on container orchestration for rapid iteration of in-game social features
• Infrastructure to enable rich in-game user-generated content
• Innovative graph-based friend services that open new opportunities for players to develop deep friendships through gameplay.

These services and platforms will be the core technology powering our current and future game titles and eventually be made available to external customers. We believe these solutions will fundamentally transform the future of multiplayer social games. We are also live-operating Sky: Children of Light with millions of active users generating terabytes of data per day. 

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will serve a pivotal role in helping architect large-scale and highly available backend systems, implement microservices that can accelerate the iterations of social gaming and user-generated content ideas, and embrace dev-ops responsibilities to serve millions of players.

On any given day at thatgamecompany, you might:

• Lead the engineering work in your expertise areas. Share knowledge with other team members, set up best engineering practices, and control code quality through reviews.
• Design and implement large-scale, highly available backend systems that serve thousands to millions of concurrent players and aim for zero downtime. 
• Embrace modern technology of container and cluster management to make our backend stack more elastic and robust.
• Improve and maintain an agile and reliable development environment for the backend stack, so that people with a different skillset in the company can make social experiments easily, and new hires can ramp up quickly.
• Monitor the backend health and respond to any failures or glitches in order to deliver a smooth online experience to players all over the world; keep improving dev-ops tools to make the job more automatic and error-proof. 

We expect you to:

• Have deep passion and thoughts for video games; be a gamer and think on behalf of players.
• Be comfortable taking risks and accomplish engineering achievements that no one else has done.
• Enjoy working with fast-moving and rapidly-growing small teams.

Required Skills

• 3 years or more of experience in production-ready backend architecture design and feature development.
• Have a thorough understanding of scalable and highly available backend systems; be familiar with open-source distributed system tech stacks, including but not limited to scalable databases, caching strategy, distributed transactions, and dev-ops tools. 
• Be able to extract useful information from different sources of logs, find correlations between multiple layers of systems and diagnose failures, suspicious behaviors, and performance bottlenecks from bottom to top.
• Proficient in Golang. Familiar with its low-level characteristics, popular frameworks, and testing solutions. Capable to create production-ready services from scratch.
• Proficient in MongoDB or PostgreSQL. Experienced in feature development and optimization in production with these databases.
• Eager to learn any new technology and always open to jumping out of your comfort zone. 

Nice to have skills

• Proficient in Kafka and using it to solve data consistency problems in large-scale microservices.
• Familiar with Kubernetes and common CI/CD tools.
• Experienced in managing production environments on AWS or GCP.

We look forward to meeting you!

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. or Canada. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

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