Lead Backend Engineer

Gardens Interactive is building multiplayer games centered on connection, collective adventure, and emergent stories. The Lead Backend Engineer leads and develops the backend engineering team while owning backend architecture, critical systems, reliability, and cross-functional engineering planning.

Responsibilities:

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers: set goals, run 1:1s, give feedback, and support career development
• Create hiring plans and interview technical candidates based on product needs
• Own team processes: planning, code review standards, on-call/bug triage, and how work gets scoped and estimated
• Create a healthy, high-trust engineering culture at a mid-size studio scale
• Review pull requests and unblock engineers on hard technical problems
• Own the evolution of our backend architecture and write production code on critical-path systems
• Own reliability, service level objectives, incident response, and infrastructure cost
• Partner closely with game design, marketing, and production to scope features and keep engineering aligned with the creative vision
• Partner with the Technical Director to create a realistic technical roadmap
• Communicate engineering status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to studio leadership

Requirements:

• 6+ years of professional backend experience, with games/live-service development
• 2+ years of experience directly managing or leading engineers
• Strong Kotlin or Java skills and familiarity with Kubernetes, Grafana, Terraform, and load-testing tools
• Hands-on experience with scaling backend systems to a global audience and the debugging, monitoring, and alerting challenges that come with it
• Solid grasp of software architecture and design patterns, and the judgment to know when to apply them versus keep things simple
• Experience working cross-functionally with design, marketing, and production on a shipped or in-development game
• Comfortable operating with high ownership in a lean team where you wear multiple hats
• Strong communication skills: able to explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers and rally a small team around a plan
• Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States or Canada
• Gardens cannot assist with work authorizations or work visas
• games/live-service development strongly preferred
• Experience taking a live-service game through launch and post-launch operations
• Experience at an independent or mid-size studio