We’ve partnered with an established Guildford based studio, to find a Lead Backend Engineer to join the team working on a new AAA unannounced project.

The studio boasts a leadership team full of industry veterans who are building a great team with an even greater culture.

As Lead Backend Engineer you will primarily be focused on maintaining a high-quality backend of a free-to-play Unreal Engine based game. Reporting directly to the Technical Director, this will involve working closely with all disciplines and leading the Backend team to identify, design, implement and maintain the scalable backend services capable of supporting millions of players.

Your responsibilities…

• Lead the technical direction and set/adjust the technical vision for the backend systems, including decisions on tech stack, frameworks, libraries, and tools

• Promote the use of coding best practices, including clean code, SOLID principles, design patterns, and efficient system designs, and perform code reviews

• Ensure scalability and performance, handle scaling challenges, optimise development, deployment, and operations processes 

• Manage the Backend team including career development, performance reviews, 1-2-1s, mentoring, training and recruiting

• Collaborate with other team Leads, Producers and Project Managers 

• Work with outsourcing partners in the games industry

The skills and experience you’ll bring to the role…

• Expertise in designing large-scale distributed systems for gaming platforms, particularly those involving real-time multiplayer, microservices, and high-availability infrastructure 

• Extensive knowledge of game-specific architectures (microservices, actor systems), ability to design efficient, low-latency data exchange systems between clients and servers 

• Experience in promoting effective development processes, fostering collaboration, adherence to clean code practices, test-driven development 

• Programming experience as a Principal or above (Kotlin, Java, Python, C/C++, C#) 

• Deep understanding of RDBMS, NoSQL databases

• Experience with cloud infrastructures to manage large-scale game services

• Experience in using Docker, Kubernetes, and other containerization/orchestration tools 

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform, and ensuring automated deployment and scaling of game backends 

• Effective communication skills to collaborate across teams 

• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, translating business needs into scalable technical solutions, aligning technical direction with product goals

Bonus points if you have experience of…

• Working with highly distributed teams 

• Operating a live free-to-play game service 

• Unreal Engine  

Perks and benefits include...

• 25 days annual leave

• Health insurance for you and your family

• Life insurance

• Pension

• Wellbeing perks

• Employee discounts package

• Social events