Senior Java Backend & DevOps Engineer

Goodgame Studios

2d•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 massive game worlds for millions of players, requiring high availability, low latency, and the ability to handle unpredictable loads. The engineer will be responsible for the entire lifecycle of backend services, from architecture and implementation to infrastructure, deployment, production, and scaling. The emphasis is on leveraging agents to achieve significantly higher throughput than traditional engineering methods, with the engineer acting as the architect and reviewer. The company, Goodgame Studios, is a self-published MMO strategy game developer with a large player base and significant revenue, part of the Stillfront Group.

Requirements

6+ years of backend Java experience, expert level.
Expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, GC tuning, and SQL optimization.
Deep knowledge of AWS and cloud-native stack (K8s, Docker, Terraform).
A real agentic coding practice, with concrete experience in structuring prompts and context for long-running tasks, managing multi-agent setups, using MCP/custom tools/skills, and reviewing agent-generated code.
Strong analytical decomposition skills to translate fuzzy product asks into precise constraints for humans and agents.
Architectural judgement to design clean, resilient systems.
Highly proficient in English.
Seeking 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, open-sourced internal tooling).

Responsibilities

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 shipped.
Run an agentic workflow that holds up under code review: precise specs, tight feedback loops, generated tests, validation gates, and architectural, security, and performance judgement.
Help define how the engineering organization adopts agentic practices, including tooling, review standards, and defining 'done' for agent-generated code.