Senior Backend Engineer

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Eleventh Hour Games, you will play a key role in shaping the technical direction of EHG. You will own core service architecture and scalability for gameplay-critical features like game server hosting, matchmaking, inventories/economy, and telemetry all while ensuring reliability under peak traffic and enabling rapid iteration by the broader engineering team. The ideal candidate thrives with complex problem-solving and brings strong communication skills to drive collaboration across a fully remote, global team. WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Own the architecture of core backend systems for Last Epoch: gameplay services, state/inventory services, player progression, and economy-related workflows.
• Design and implement scalable APIs and event-driven pipelines.
• Build for high availability and performance on Azure, including data storage, caching, queues, and background processing.
• Establish engineering standards for C# backend development: patterns, performance practices, resilience, observability, and security.
• Drive reliability practices: idempotency, consistency models, graceful degradation, incident response, and chaos-minded fault handling.
• Partner with game design and product to translate gameplay requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Improve code and feature velocity through reviews, architecture docs, and reusable frameworks/libraries.
• Contribute to CI/CD and operational readiness: automated tests, deployments, monitoring/alerting, and run books., * Security & Compliance: Apply secure-by-default practices (authn/authz, proper secret handling, least privilege, and threat modeling for exposed endpoints).
• System Design & Ownership: Define service boundaries, contracts, and data models; make key tradeoffs for cost/latency/consistency.
• Scalability & Reliability: Implement durable messaging patterns, backpressure strategies, and fault-tolerant workflows.
• Performance Engineering: Optimize hot paths in C# services and reduce latency through caching, batching, and efficient data access.
• Observability: Ensure logs/metrics/traces support debugging and live operations; set SLOs/SLAs where appropriate.
• On-Call: Diagnose and lead resolution of complex service, infrastructure, and live-ops issues; participation in an on-call rotation (Pager Duty)

• 5+ years building and supporting online services with SLA requirements
• Strong backend engineering experience writing high performance C#
• Production experience on Azure, with specific focus on AKS and CosmosDB
• Demonstrated experience building distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Deep understanding of data consistency, idempotency, retries, and failure modes.
• Strong hands-on skills in API design, performance tuning, and operational excellence.
• Experience designing systems that support real-time or near-real-time gameplay loops (sessions, lobbies, inventory updates, or matchmaking/server instance lifecycles).
• Background in systems design, with ability to build maintainable, scalable solutions
• Experience with mentoring engineers, code reviews, and setting technical standards
• Excellent cross-discipline collaboration and communication skills

PREFERENCES:

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

Reasonable Accommodation