Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer – Agentic Engineering

Goodgame Studios

19d • Remote

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer who has practical experience running agentic workflows as a core part of their development process. This role involves working on backend systems that support millions of players in real-time, requiring high availability, low latency, and the ability to handle unpredictable load. The engineer will be responsible for the end-to-end ownership of backend services, including architecture, implementation, infrastructure, deployment, production, and scaling. The emphasis is on leveraging agents to achieve significantly higher throughput than traditional engineering methods, while maintaining architectural oversight and quality control. The mission includes designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency Java services on AWS, K8s, and Terraform, building resilient distributed components, optimizing performance, and owning CI/CD, observability, and on-call responsibilities. A key aspect is running an effective agentic workflow, including precise specifications, feedback loops, generated tests, validation gates, and final human judgment on architecture, security, and performance. The role also involves helping to define and guide the adoption of agentic practices across the engineering organization.

Requirements

• 6+ years backend Java, expert level.
• Expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning, SQL optimisation.
• Deep AWS and cloud-native stack knowledge (K8s, Docker, Terraform).
• A real agentic coding practice, with concrete examples of structuring prompts and context for long-running tasks, managing multi-agent setups, using MCP / custom tools / skills, and reviewing agent-generated code without becoming a bottleneck.
• Strong analytical decomposition skills to turn fuzzy product asks into precise constraints.
• Architectural judgement to design clean, resilient systems.
• Excellent written English.
• Full-time remote roles (within Germany, valid German visa required) or Freelance opportunities within the German timezone (CET/CEST).

Nice To Haves

• Gaming backend experience (matchmaking, inventories, leaderboards, economy services).
• Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, SQS/SNS).
• Experience with real-time telemetry or anti-cheat systems.
• Published or shared work on agentic workflows – blog posts, OSS subagents/skills, internal tooling you've open-sourced.

Responsibilities

• Own backend services end-to-end: architecture, implementation, infrastructure, deployment, production, scaling.
• Operate at 10–20× the throughput of a classical engineer by orchestrating agents rather than typing every line yourself.
• Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency Java services (JDK 17+) on AWS, K8s, Terraform, ArgoCD.
• Build resilient distributed components and tune memory, concurrency, and GC for real production workloads.
• Architect MySQL and Redis layers handling millions of player rows.
• Own CI/CD, observability, and on-call for systems you ship.
• Run an agentic workflow that holds up under code review: precise specs, tight feedback loops, generated tests, validation gates, your judgement as the final filter on architecture, security, and performance.
• Help define how the rest of the engineering org adopts agentic practices – tooling, review standards, what "done" means when an agent wrote 80% of the diff.

Benefits

• High autonomy.
• Remote within the German time zone.
• Engineering-first culture.
• Genuinely interesting technical surface area: Java, MySQL, Redis, AWS, distributed systems, plus the meta-problem of how to run all of it agentically without sacrificing reliability.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed