Staff Backend Engineer

We're looking for a hardworking and passionate Staff Backend Engineer to join Wildlife's Engineering team.

We know that the work we do has a high impact on our company's success and culture. The right person for this position is curious by nature, and comfortable in a “take the initiative” environment, loves solving problems, and can thrive in a fast and growing business.

The Backend Team at Wildlife is reinventing itself. It started providing services for the games' online features and has since evolved to provide a platform that leverages the best of our teams when creating, operating and distributing our games.

We know that the work we do has a high impact on our company's success and to achieve that, we work with a broad technology stack and have an approach of being fully responsible for our systems, from their conception to incident resolution and troubleshooting in production.

We own several services that, combined, serve more than 1 million requests per minute. We know this number will only grow, and we're looking for engineers that can help with the challenges of developing backend systems that perform well at a large scale.

• Set technical direction for key platform and AI-powered domains, designing architectures that serve multiple games and teams, defining how traditional services and AI/LLM-based capabilities work together, and making pragmatic trade-offs between speed, quality, cost, and model usage.
• Lead cross-team initiatives end-to-end, from discovery and technical design to rollout, monitoring, and iteration, unblocking dependencies and ensuring projects deliver real business and player impact.
• Raise the bar on operational excellence by defining and improving SLIs/SLOs, evolving our observability, reducing incident frequency and mTTR, and driving cost and performance improvements across shared infrastructure (databases, caches, queues, etc.). 
• Simplify the life of every developer using our platform: reduce complexity, improve APIs and developer experience, shorten cycle times, and champion solutions that scale across teams – not just for a single project.
• Mentor and multiply other engineers (mid, senior, and staff-in-progress): coach on design and decision-making, review high-impact RFCs and architecture docs, give clear feedback, and help create the next generation of technical leaders at Wildlife. 
• Be a visible technical voice in the org for platform and AI topics, leading design/postmortem/ops reviews, contributing to RFCs, influencing our AI strategy from an engineering perspective, and representing your team in planning and engineering-wide discussions.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent tech areas and/or equivalent experience.
• Experience developing and maintaining systems with a high volume of requests.
• Proven experience leading complex technical projects that span multiple teams or systems, including scoping, milestones, risk management, and cross-team communication.
• Solid understanding of computer concepts (data structures, networking, concurrency, memory management, and algorithm analysis).
• Excellent knowledge of software testing concepts (testability, escape rate, regression, unit, integration, soak, stress, test automation).
• Experience owning projects end-to-end: from scoping and milestones to rollout, monitoring, and post-release improvements.
• Excellent communication skills: you can go deep with engineers and speak business impact with PMs and leaders, adapting message and level of detail to the audience.

• Experience developing systems in the games industry.
• Experience developing systems in the ad tech ecosystem.
• Experience developing platform products.
• Experience in Golang.
• Experience in Unity development.

• You're passionate about software development and know how to ensure its quality.
• You're motivated by building up back-end services and are aware of its different architectures.
• Experienced working in an environment which uses and stimulates DevOps culture;
• You're creative when solving problems and are continuously seeking improvements for processes and solutions.
• You can communicate clearly with your team and the company to identify issues and demands.
• You enjoy mentoring and unblocking others, sharing context, and being a technical reference that people seek out.
• You contribute to engineering culture beyond your team: tech talks, RFCs, postmortem reviews, hackathons, or other initiatives that raise the bar for everyone.

Wildlife is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, colour, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law.

We're committed to providing accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process.