Lead Backend Engineer

2K • San Mateo, CA

3d • Remote

About The Position

31st Union is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to lead the team responsible for building and operating studio-hosted services. The role manages backend engineers across US and EU studios, owns service and infrastructure architecture, and contributes code alongside the team. It is the primary point of contact for backend technical decisions and incidents, reports to the Director - Online Services, and is based in the San Mateo, California studio or may be performed fully remotely.

The Lead Backend Engineer leads team management and planning, establishes engineering standards, owns backend architecture and implementation, and aligns releases and deployment processes with the studio schedule. The role also oversees service operations, on-call response, reliability, performance, cost management, disaster recovery, and integration with 2K and external platform services. The studio is working on Project ETHOS, a free-to-play, third-person rogue-like hero shooter.

Requirements

• 10+ years of server-side development experience, complemented by a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience leading or managing backend engineers on a shipped AAA title; live-service or competitive multiplayer game experience is preferred.
• Fluency in C# and proficiency in Python or Go.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems, concurrency, and scalable service design.
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or DocumentDB, and with Redis.
• Experience deploying and operating production services on AWS.
• Ability to give direct, constructive feedback and invite feedback from others.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and microservice architectures.
• Experience profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including database queries and service calls.
• Experience with real-time messaging such as MQTT and API gateways.
• Experience with C++ and Unreal Engine.
• Experience with online game systems such as matchmaking, social, progression, commerce, and telemetry.
• Experience running a live title, including incident response, capacity planning, and cost management.

Responsibilities

• Manage backend engineers, including regular one-on-ones, goal setting, performance feedback, and hiring.
• Lead team planning by maintaining the backlog, estimating work, and setting sprint priorities against the online services roadmap.
• Set 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 proprietary studio backend services.
• Align the backend roadmap with the studio release schedule.
• Diagnose, fix, and deploy backend hotfixes through the studio hotfix process.
• Maintain continuous integration pipelines and deployment automation for services.
• Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, and incident reporting for studio services.
• Run the backend on-call rotation and 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 services and their data.
• Integrate proprietary studio services with 2K and external platform services.
• Debug cross-service issues with external engineering partners.

Benefits

• The total compensation package for employees in regular roles may include a bonus and/or equity awards, in addition to medical, financial, and other benefits. Details of applicable plans are provided if an employee receives an offer.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior