Backend Staff Engineer

The Staff Backend Engineer will lead the development of backend services for a mobile game app, focusing on APIs, data models, and real-time communication features, while mentoring other engineers and ensuring system reliability and performance. The summary above was generated by AI

Scopely is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join the MONOPOLY GO! Chat team in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, or remotely within Canada and the US.

MONOPOLY GO! is a global phenomenon and the biggest mobile game launch in history, captivating millions of players worldwide. MONOPOLY GO! Chat is a companion app that helps players connect, coordinate, and share the fun beyond the game.

What You Will Do

You will work closely with a small, cross-functional team to guide, build, and improve backend systems for the companion app of a game played by millions of players worldwide. You will be responsible for:

• Leading technical direction for MONOPOLY GO! Chat backend services, APIs, data models, and real-time communication systems
• Designing and building scalable social and chat features such as conversations, messages, reactions, invites, blocking, reporting, notifications, and presence
• Turning ambiguous product goals into clear technical plans with product, design, QA, game teams, trust and safety, platform, and other partners
• Owning reliability, performance, security, observability, release readiness, and operational quality for production backend systems
• Designing resilient distributed systems using patterns for async processing, caching, search, data modeling, event-driven workflows, and graceful degradation
• Mentoring engineers, improving technical decision-making, and helping the team adopt strong engineering and AI-assisted development practices

• 8+ years of professional experience building backend services for mobile apps, games, social products, or similarly complex product teams

• Deep professional experience with C#, ASP.NET, and backend service development in production environments

• Strong systems design skills across distributed systems, API design, async processing, caching, data modeling, reliability, and scalability

• Experience building cloud-native services on AWS with technologies such as DynamoDB, Redis, OpenSearch, SQS/SNS, Lambda, ECS, or similar services

• Experience designing high-throughput, low-latency systems that support mobile clients and unreliable network conditions

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, design patterns, testing, debugging, and maintainable architecture

• Solid understanding of application security concepts, including authentication, authorization, secure API design, rate limiting, privacy, and data protection

• Experience leading technical design, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and aligning technical work across teams

• Ability to write effective prompts, supervise agent-driven development work, and guide safe, useful AI-assisted engineering practices

• Excellent technical communication skills and a desire to address player and stakeholder feedback

Bonus Points

• Experience building real-time chat, messaging, social graph, moderation, notification, or activity feed systems

• Experience with trust and safety systems, content moderation, reporting flows, spam prevention, or abuse detection

• Experience integrating social features with game systems, LiveOps, experiments, feature flags, or staged rollouts

• Experience with observability, incident response, SLOs, production debugging, and operational ownership of live services

• Experience with Unity, mobile game backend systems, or game client/server integrations

• Experience with DynamoDB single-table or high-scale access patterns, Redis caching strategies, or event-driven architectures

At Scopely, we create games for everyone - and want to ensure that the people behind our games reflect that! We are committed to creating a diverse, supportive work environment where everyone is treated with respect.

We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities and welcome individuals from all backgrounds to join us and embrace the adventure!

Employment at Scopely is based solely on a person's merit and qualifications.

Scopely makes hiring decisions without regard to protected status under applicable law.

For candidates in CA, CO, NJ, NY, and WA, the annual salary range is provided below. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible for equity, bonuses, and a comprehensive benefits package, including healthcare benefits, retirement benefits, pet insurance, paid holidays, paid Scopely free days, and unlimited paid time off. Base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. CA, CO, NJ, NY, and WA Annual Salary Range $169,600-$253,000 USD About Scopely

Scopely is a leading video game and global interactive entertainment company, home to many of the world's most beloved and enduring experiences, including two of the most successful mobile games of all-time "MONOPOLY GO!" and "Pokémon GO," along with "Stumble Guys," "Star Trek Fleet Command," "MARVEL Strike Force," "WWE Champions," the Scrabble® franchise, "Yahtzee® With Buddies," and many others. Across mobile, web, PC, and console, Scopely creates, develops, publishes, and live-operates one of the most diversified and award-winning portfolios in the games industry - bringing hundreds of millions of players together through a shared love of play. Founded in 2011, Scopely is powered by its exceptional team - including thousands of world-class gamemakers around the globe, a distinctive tenet-driven culture, and its proprietary technology platform, Playgami. Together, these strengths have fueled Scopely's position as the #1 mobile games company in the U.S. and #2 globally, generating more than $10 billion in lifetime revenue. Whether building global sensations like "MONOPOLY GO!" from the ground up, or expanding through strategic acquisitions, including the FoxNext, GSN, and Niantic games businesses - Scopely consistently delivers experiences players love today and return to for years to come. Recognized multiple times as one of the "100 Most Influential Companies in the World" by TIME magazine and one of Fast Company's "World's Most Innovative Companies" and "Best Workplaces for Innovators," Scopely believes that video games can be a force for good - creating meaningful connections, vibrant communities, and making life better through play. Scopely has global operations and partners across four continents in more than a dozen countries worldwide. For more information, visit: https://www.scopely.com/. Notice to Candidates: Scopely will never request payment or financial information during the application or hiring process. Please apply only through our official website and verify that all Talent Partner communications come from an email address ending in @scopely.com.