Backend Lead Engineer

About the Role

We're building the US/EU version of Livly Island, a mobile social game with 4+ years of live service history and 20,000+ content assets. You'll be the first backend engineer on the UK team, taking ownership of a mature Go-based microservices platform and leading it toward full technical independence.

What You'll Do

• Own and operate the backend infrastructure: deployment, monitoring, incident response
• Work with the existing Go codebase (4 services: main API, realtime chat, CMS admin panel, data validation tooling)
• Set up and manage new region cloud infrastructure (AWS + GCP)
• Collaborate with HQ's engineering team during knowledge transfer, then gradually take over backend ownership
• Hire and onboard additional backend engineers as the team grows
• Partner with the client engineer (Unity/C#) to ship features for the market launch

Must Have

• 5+ years backend development, 3+ years with Go
• Production experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers
• Strong MongoDB experience (replica sets, read preference, performance tuning)
• Redis (cluster mode, pub/sub, caching patterns)
• Cloud infrastructure: AWS (S3, CloudFront, ECS, Lambda) and/or GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud Storage)
• Docker, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions)
• Comfortable being the sole backend engineer initially — you debug, deploy, and firefight

Nice to Have

• Experience with mobile game backends or live service games
• Datadog / Prometheus / Stackdriver monitoring
• Japanese language ability (HQ communication, though English is primary)
• Experience with billing/payment integrations
• Terraform or infrastructure-as-code

Tech Stack

• Go 1.24+, gRPC, Protocol Buffers
• MongoDB, Redis Cluster
• AWS (S3, CloudFront, ECS, Lambda, CodeDeploy) + GCP (Compute Engine, Stackdriver)
• Docker, GitHub Actions, Jenkins
• Datadog APM, Prometheus, Scouter
• JWT auth, Firebase Cloud Messaging

What We Offer

• Full ownership of backend for a game launching in a new market
• Small, autonomous team with creative freedom
• Direct collaboration with experienced JP engineering team during handover
• Path to building and leading a backend team