Lead Backend Engineer

Overview

Lead the backend engineering team for 2K's studio-hosted services on Project ETHOS, a free-to-play, 3rd person rogue-like hero shooter. The role manages backend engineers in US and EU studios, owns service architecture and infrastructure, and writes code alongside the team.

What you'll do

• Manage the backend engineering team: hold regular 1:1s, set goals, give performance feedback, and lead hiring.
• Run backend team planning: maintain the backlog, estimate work, and set sprint priorities against the online services roadmap.
• Set engineering standards for code review, testing, documentation and on-call readiness.
• Own the architecture of studio-hosted services and infrastructure, including service boundaries, data models, APIs and deployment topology.
• Scope backend work for new game features.
• Write and review technical designs for new services and major changes.
• Implement and review implementations for proprietary studio backend services.
• Align the backend roadmap with the studio release schedule.
• Diagnose, fix and deploy backend hotfixes through the studio hotfix process.
• Maintain continuous integration pipelines and deployment automation for services.
• Own monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks and incident reporting for studio services.
• Run the backend on-call rotation and act as first responder and escalation point for backend incidents.
• Load test services before major releases, fix performance bottlenecks, and optimize service costs.
• Implement and test failover and disaster recovery for services and their data.
• Integrate studio proprietary services with 2K and external platform services.
• Debug cross-service issues with external engineering partners.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of server-side development experience.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Has led or managed backend engineers on a shipped AAA title.
• Fluent in C#.
• Proficient in Python or Go.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems, concurrency and scalable service design.
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or DocumentDB, and with Redis.
• Has deployed and operated production services on AWS.
• Gives direct, constructive feedback and invites it from others.

Nice to have

• Experience on a live-service or competitive multiplayer game.
• Kubernetes, Helm and microservice architectures.
• Profiling and optimizing distributed systems, including database queries and service calls.
• Real-time messaging, such as MQTT, and API gateways.
• C++ and Unreal Engine.
• Online game systems such as matchmaking, social, progression, commerce and telemetry.
• Running a live title: incident response, capacity planning and cost management.

Details

• Based in the San Mateo, California studio; open to fully remote candidates.
• Reports to the Director - Online Services.
• Pay range in California: $169,100 to $250,280 per year, based on market location and individual factors.
• Employment is at-will.
• No visa sponsorship or assistance is available; candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship.