Lead Server Engineer

SciPlay•Austin, TX

5d•Onsite

About The Position

We're hiring a Lead Server Engineer for Gold Fish Casino Slots. It's a nine-figure-revenue PHP codebase that's been shipping continuously for over a decade. The job is making this codebase substantially better, not keeping it from getting worse. We care more about finding the right person than filling the seat quickly. Technical depth is the minimum bar. The harder thing this role asks for is judgment about where to spend it. You need to be able to discern priorities at two levels. The first is technical execution order across a long arc of work: what unblocks what, what's safe to ship in isolation, what needs to wait. The second is your own scope: what to take on yourself, what to design and hand off, what to coordinate across the team. You'll work with engineering leadership on roadmap and tradeoffs. You set technical standards by example, mentor mid-level engineers through complex work, and write code. This is a hands-on role, not a planning role. Beyond the game server, you'll also have influence in our admin tooling stack: a PHP backend with jQuery and Vue.js on the front end, which has its own rough edges and its own room for improvement.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time as a senior or lead engineer on a production system.
Deep PHP, including Composer, dependency injection containers (Symfony DI or equivalent), and static analysis.
Ability to call priorities at two levels: technical execution order, and your own scope.
Experience writing code that runs in production, considering load, failure modes, and stability.
Testing judgment: knowing when to write a unit test, when to invest in heavier verification, and when to ship behind a flag.
Experience technically leading or mentoring other engineers.
Ability to set the standard for the team through code and reviews.
Relentlessly curious: figure out how bugs got there, if they exist elsewhere, and what the system would look like if they couldn't occur.
Critical thinker: ask why a pattern exists before accepting it, and pressure-test the first answer.
Ability to design for the codebase that exists, holding competing patterns in mind and deciding when to converge them or leave them alone.
Ability to propose changes that can be shipped, not just rewrites.
Act as a team multiplier through code review, design conversations, and pairing.
Product-minded: understand that code is experienced by real players and that 'behavior-preserving refactor' is important.

Nice To Haves

Experience with large-scale architectural refactors on legacy PHP.
Production experience with modern observability stacks (metrics, tracing, profiling, structured logs).
Experience in the live-service games industry or another high-throughput, revenue-critical consumer service.
Experience with Vue.js or jQuery.
AWS or similar cloud technology.

Responsibilities

Make a legacy PHP codebase substantially better.
Set technical standards by example.
Mentor mid-level engineers through complex work.
Write code.
Influence the admin tooling stack.
Surface tradeoffs and risks early, with evidence.
Write clear design docs and PR descriptions.
Conduct code reviews that make the team better.
Escalate issues when necessary.

Benefits

Competitive salaries
Annual bonuses
Matching 401k
Open Office Concept with Ergonomic Seating and Standing Desks
Game Room featuring current generation consoles, numerous game titles, and various table games
Fully Stocked Kitchen with Beverages and Snacks
Company-paid lunches 2x/week
Paid Family Leave
Paid Volunteer Time
Annual 2-night company retreat