Senior Backend Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of core backend systems for Last Epoch, including gameplay services, state and inventory services, player progression, and economy workflows.
• Design and implement scalable APIs and event-driven pipelines.
• Build highly available, performant services on Azure using data storage, caching, queues, and background processing.
• Establish engineering standards for C# backend development, including performance, resilience, observability, and security practices.
• Drive reliability practices such as idempotency, consistency models, graceful degradation, incident response, and fault handling.
• Partner with game design and product to translate gameplay requirements into technical solutions.
• Improve engineering velocity through code reviews, architecture documentation, and reusable frameworks and libraries.
• Contribute to CI/CD and operational readiness through automated tests, deployments, monitoring, alerting, and runbooks.
• Define service boundaries, contracts, and data models; make tradeoffs involving cost, latency, and consistency.
• Implement durable messaging, backpressure, and fault-tolerant workflows.
• Optimize C# service hot paths through caching, batching, and efficient data access.
• Ensure logs, metrics, and traces support debugging and live operations; establish SLOs and SLAs where appropriate.
• Diagnose and lead resolution of complex service, infrastructure, and live-operations issues; participate in an on-call rotation.

Requirements

• 5+ years building and supporting online services with SLA requirements.
• Strong backend engineering experience with high-performance C#.
• Production experience with Azure, particularly AKS and Cosmos DB.
• Experience building distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Deep understanding of data consistency, idempotency, retries, and failure modes.
• Hands-on experience with API design, performance tuning, and operational excellence.
• Experience designing systems supporting real-time or near-real-time gameplay loops, such as sessions, lobbies, inventory updates, or matchmaking and server-instance lifecycles.
• Systems-design experience with the ability to build maintainable, scalable solutions.
• Experience mentoring engineers, conducting code reviews, and setting technical standards.
• Excellent cross-discipline collaboration and communication skills.

Nice-to-haves

• 2+ years of experience working in a game studio.
• Experience configuring PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch storefronts.
• Experience with PlayFab or Nitrado/GameFabric.
• Unity or Unreal experience.
• Experience optimizing performance across PC and console platforms.
• Knowledge of ARPGs, action-combat systems, or similar games.
• Experience building games as a service (GaaS).