Lead Backend Engineer

2K•San Mateo, CA

17h•$169,100 - $250,280

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 in the US and EU studios, owns service and infrastructure architecture, and contributes code alongside the team. The Lead Backend Engineer is the first point of contact for backend technical decisions and incidents and reports to the Director - Online Services. The role is based at the San Mateo, California studio and is also open to fully remote candidates. The position combines team leadership, backend architecture and development, release and deployment coordination, operational ownership, and platform integration. The Lead Backend Engineer manages planning and hiring, sets engineering standards, designs and implements studio backend services, and oversees reliability, monitoring, incident response, performance, and cost management. The role also integrates studio services with 2K and external platforms and works with external engineering partners to resolve cross-service issues.

Requirements

10+ years of server-side development experience, complemented by a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Has led or managed backend engineers on a shipped AAA title, preferably a 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 such as MongoDB or DocumentDB, and with Redis.
Has deployed and operated production services on AWS.
Gives direct, constructive feedback and invites it 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 through regular 1:1s, 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 studio proprietary 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 studio proprietary services with 2K and external platform services.
Debug cross-service issues with external engineering partners.